All the recollections in the screenplay are my personal recollections. It all happened to me, as well as to the people around me: mother, father, grandfather, grandmother, friends and enemies, the German officer in our house the entire war.
Those recollections might have been hemmed or frilled to a certain extent, with lace or a decorative button added here and there not to embellish or falsify them or to make them more authentic but rather to make them more cinematic, because film is larger than life.
The recollections of that 1939-45 world are very well defined in my conscious mind. I lived and grew up in hell, but for me it was heaven I did not know it was war, I thought it was just my life, and my life was exciting, dangerous and amorous.
I was living in a double ring of fire, surrounded by my family`s indifference and self-centeredness but protected by the love and attention of a stranger a German officer. In the visual sense, that bygone world and those recollections were unalterable: it was a wide-frame world with a fixed focus, and with extreme high and low angles since I had spent most of my time under the table, among the legs of grownups or high up on a tree, alone and free.
In a photographic sense, it was a black and white world. The power would frequently go off, everything was darkened during the war, and we would hide in basements from German, American, English and Russian planes. During war, nights are long. During war, there is no sun or dreams of sun. Colors are also part of my recollections: black swastikas, white victory and red the five pointed star. The color red is dominant, because red is the color of blood which flowed in the streams of my childhood. There was a lot of green: green is the fruit of my child- hood, because all the fruit in nature was picked and eaten while still green. Green apples, pears, apricots, green strawberries. Our hunger had no patience, and only after the war was over did I realize that fruit does ripen.
I would be very happy to film my true story about an untrue life. I think that the film How I was Stolen by the Germans would shed light on a fantastic but forgotten setting of our past, and the image of that forgotten setting might enhance the future of many unhappy children. It might also inflict a bitter blow on our selfish old-age and cause it.
Milos Radivojevic
