History of stunt in Serbia

The first man who did stunts in our country was Dragoljub Aleksic-Artista. He used his skills to show movie action, but we can say he was the first. It was in 1943 or 1944 and movies had to be shot secretly under the radar of occupation forces. In 1956 Toske gathered a group of men who are willing to do dangerous feats in front of the camera. The stuntman union was made in 1968. But as the members retired the union faded to oblivion.

In 1992 during the DIF skiing preparations at Brezovica I did numerous stunts amongst which were jumps from a cable-car. During that period I made friends with Rasa Jelic who was also into this kind of extreme sports and adrenaline rushes. It turned out that both of us saw a show during the 1980’s about Bata Kameni where he talked about stuntmen and stunts. So we decided that we should become stuntman for a living. I already had some experience with movies. I was in the movie Slatko od Snova (1994) and did some commercials. Rasa did some music videos. We decided that we’ll work a as team so we did some preparations for numerous dangerous stunts. All by ourselves. And we made a deal that if anyone of us made a contact with any older and more known stuntman Bata, Pigi or Zvonce, calls the other one. Zvonce called back and let us into the movie stuntman world. During the shoot of the movie Treca Sreca (1995) we made a union of our own. The members were Zoran Vranov, Rasa Jelic, Zeljko Bozic and Nesa Veselinovic. The later two were from Ljuba Vracarevic’s school of AIKIDO. And they came to the set as a fight coordinators-not stuntmen. Stanka Savcic world champion at kickbox at the time joined pout group a bit later. So did Vladica Fistric, karate state champion, Aleksandar Radivojevic – Sale, Dule Savcic and Batica Fistric. In 1997 the stuntmen group “Zvonce” had more that 10 top athletes amongst its lines. But at the end of 1990’s and beginning of 2000 every guy wanted his own union or group so everything dissolved yet again.