Blum - Masters of Their Own Destiny

Having illuminated Serbian war crimes committed during the breakup of Yugoslavia between 1991 and 2001 in dramatic fiction films such as Grbavica (2006) and her Academy Award–nominated Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020), Žbanić turns to documentary form to shed light on an extraordinary historical figure, Emerik Blum.

Born in Sarajevo in 1911 into a family of Hungarian Jews, and an electronic engineering student in Prague in the late 1930s, Blum survived the most notorious concentration camp of Jasenovac, established and operated by the governing Ustaše regime, Europe's only Nazi collaborationists that operated extermination camps for Serbs, Romani, Jews, and political dissidents during World War II.

Blum thrived during the early postwar years of Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavia by ascending to top ministerial positions in the power sector, leading him to become the founding director of Energoinvest, one of Europe’s largest (and still-preeminent) engineering conglomerates, which grew over time from 70 to 42,000 employees, becoming one of the first Yugoslav industrial conglomerates.

Fascinating archival footage and contemporary testimonials in Žbanić’s film reveal Blum to have been a humane boss and a shrewd diplomat, bringing technological advancements and efficiencies together with an understanding of how Yugoslavia’s non-alignment policies could serve his company’s international success. In doing so, Blum also helped open the nation to a world caught in the geopolitical rivalries of the Cold War.

Blum succeeded in what today seems like a contradiction: he built a massive corporate energy and engineering conglomerate in a socialist state. Žbanić captures the dizzying sense of a democratic model of worker self-management that could beat capitalists at their own game, while providing workers with free meals, housing and medical care. The film is a lively testament to the unwavering power of Blum’s vision, and a reminder that business can thrive under models very different from today’s rapacious capitalism.