When Hollywood Came to Trebinje: The Story of a City That Became a Film Set

They stayed for four months. Four hundred horses were brought in. And virtually the entire town became part of the cast.

“Even today, schoolgirls and young women in Trebinje think of UFA, of Hollywood - of film itself - and wonder whether four months of filming will ever happen again - four months when the whole of Trebinje appeared as extras. Four months when the people of Trebinje earned good money and Mount Leotar became famous through film,” the Belgrade newspaper Vreme wrote in 1937.

From that moment on, Trebinje could never quite stop being a film city.

Milena Dravić at 17, and the making of a star

In 1959, Czech director František Čáp arrived in Trebinje with the crew of Vrata ostaju otvorena (The Door Remains Open). Few could have known that the production would enter film history for an entirely different reason.

It marked the first major-screen appearance of Milena Dravić, then just 17 years old. Over the following decades, she would become one of the defining actresses - and greatest stars - of Yugoslav cinema.

Trebinje was present at the beginning of a remarkable career, although no one knew it at the time.

A few years later, in 1965, the East German DEFA film studio arrived. The crew shot Sons of the Great Bear, the first East German western, with locations including Zupci and Popovo Polje.

Playing the Native American chief was Gojko Mitić, a Serbian-born actor who would go on to become the biggest western star in East Germany, an icon followed by millions of cinema-goers across Eastern Europe.

“As far as Trebinje is concerned, I can say with certainty that it is one of the most beautiful film locations. It is a genuine open-air studio where films of an extraordinarily wide range of genres can be made,” said the film’s production manager Heinz Frely at the time.

Trebinje as the Wild West

The 1960s were Trebinje’s golden age of cinema.

The landscapes around the city - the limestone, ravines and vast expanses of Popovo Polje - became the backdrop for spectacles that might otherwise have been filmed in Colorado.

Actual western towns were constructed in Zupci and Popovo Polje. Fort Grand and Golden Hills rose from the Herzegovinian landscape, transforming the region into a cinematic version of the American frontier, reports Naša Hercegovina.

From Berlin came director Harald Reinl, who was adapting Karl May’s western novels. Lex Barker, already famous worldwide for playing Tarzan, portrayed Old Shatterhand, while French actor Pierre Brice played Winnetou.

At the same time, on those very same landscapes and on the other side of the Iron Curtain, East German filmmakers were creating their own version of the western. Two ideologically opposed film industries shared the same Trebinje rocks.

“This is the first film made in Yugoslavia to be shot in Eastmancolor on 70mm film,” Glas Trebinja reported in 1963.

Čkalja, Vujisić, Marković - and filmmakers who kept coming back

During those years, Trebinje attracted some of the most popular actors in Yugoslav cinema.

Miodrag Petrović Čkalja came to shoot the comedy Around the World. Pavle Vuisić, Olivera Marković, Rade Marković, Ljubiša Jovanović and many others passed through the city at one point or another, leaving behind memories that often came down to the same thing: the landscape, the atmosphere and the people.

“We became deeply attached to the surroundings, and with every completed stage of filming, it felt as though something dear to us was disappearing forever,” director Soja Jovanović said in 1964.

Rade Marković, who was shooting his third consecutive film in Herzegovina, was equally emphatic: southern Herzegovina, he said, was so rich in diverse landscapes that almost anything could be filmed there.

Ranjeni orao and Anđelka’s Gate

If one production can be singled out for having permanently changed Trebinje’s identity as a tourist destination, it is Zdravko Šotra’s 2008 television series Ranjeni orao (Wounded Eagle).

Sloboda Mićalović’s portrayal of Anđelka Bojanić, entering her courtyard through a distinctive gate in the Old Town, transformed a simple architectural detail into a cultural phenomenon.

That gate is now known as Anđelka’s Gate and has become one of Trebinje’s most visited landmarks. Thousands of people come to the city every year specifically to see it.

Mićalović herself still returns regularly, quietly and without announcement. Whenever she posts a photograph from Trebinje, millions of views carry the city’s name far beyond Herzegovina.

“I fell deeply in love with Trebinje, just as I love the city I come from, Leskovac. The people here see me as one of their own. I often say that they gave me a monument in my lifetime - Anđelka’s Gate,” Mićalović said.

Monica Bellucci and three years in Herzegovina

But perhaps no production demanded as much from Trebinje as Emir Kusturica’s On the Milky Road, released in 2016.

Three years of filming.

Locations stretched from Klobuk, where the house of the film’s main characters was built, to the authentic stone village of Uvjeća, Trebinje’s market - completely transformed for wartime scenes - as well as Popovo Polje and Mount Volujak.

And in the leading role was one of the most recognisable faces in the history of world cinema: Monica Bellucci.

Throughout the shoot, Bellucci spoke openly about her admiration for Trebinje’s beauty and hospitality. The presence of an international film star in the city over such an extended period was something rarely seen, and its promotional impact on Trebinje is difficult to measure.

Alongside Bellucci and Kusturica, the film also featured Sloboda Mićalović, closing the circle in a particularly fitting way.

A list that speaks for itself

Between The Gypsy Baron in 1935 and the present day, the list of productions filmed in Trebinje has become long and remarkably diverse.

Kuća na obali (House on the Shore, 1954), with a screenplay by a then little-known writer named Meša Selimović. Vrata ostaju otvorena (The Door Remains Open, 1959), featuring a young Milena Dravić. Bombaši (The Bombers, 1973), a partisan film directed by Branko Bauer. Tajna manastirske rakije (The Secret of Monastery Rakija, 1988), directed by Slobodan Šijan. Najbolji (The Best, 1989). The cult classic Nož (The Knife, 1999). TNT: Velika letnja avantura (TNT: The Great Summer Adventure, 2010). Srđan Golubović’s Circles (2013), inspired by the true story of Srđan Aleksić. Nemanjići (2018), RTS’s largest drama production at the time, for which Trebinje craftsmen forged around fifty medieval swords. And 12 reči (12 Words, 2023), whose second season was filmed across several locations in the city.

The producers who came to Trebinje tended to say more or less the same thing.

The stone. The light. The landscapes. The nature. And the people - people who help, remember, improvise, and somehow make a production feel at home.

A city waiting to be discovered

In 1961, Dževad Fazlinović wrote in Glas Trebinja about a city that was “a beautiful extra” in films, but one that was still waiting to become the protagonist of its own cinematic story.

Sixty-five years later, that story is being written.

More slowly than it perhaps should be, but it is being written.

Trebinje is not Hollywood. But it possesses something Hollywood cannot buy with any budget.

It has stone streets along which Adolf Wohlbrück and Monica Bellucci once walked. It has a gate that brings thousands of visitors who might never have heard of the city had they not watched a television series.

And it has people who, no matter who arrives to film, seem to leave the same impression.

“We felt as though everyone was ready to help us,” a German director said in 1965.

That has not changed.

• Author: Dubravko Curać
• Source: Naša Hercegovina