DOCUMENTARY

Once Brothers (2010)

AT a time when the ruthless leadership shown by basketball legend Michael Jordan in The Last Dance has been hailed for raising the bar for sports documentaries, this tale from the hard courts may feel a little dated. However, what it loses in cutting-edge drama, it gains in humanity. Directed by Michael Tolajian, it is the story of how the Balkan conflict shredded the friendship of two former world championship winning Yugoslavian team-mates, Serbia’s Vlade Divac and Croatia’s Drazen Petrovic. Ironically, it was the moment of their greatest success that sundered their friendship when, after the final buzzer in the 1990 FIBA World Championship final had sounded, Divac – who narrates the film – confronted a fan waving a Croatian flag, before removing it. At a time when national tensions were simmering, it was an incident that sparked Croatian outrage, ensuring that Divac became a polarising figure overnight. By that stage, both players had moved to the NBA, with Divac securing a place on the LA Lakers’ roster, while Petrovic was snapped up by the Portland Trail Blazers. From being almost in daily contact, Petrovic, perhaps mindful of how his friendship with Divac would be viewed at home, pulled the shutters down. Tragically, there would be no reconciliation as Petrovic was killed in a car accident in 1993, and this documentary amounts to an effort by Divac to find some closure, returning to Zagreb in the final scenes to meet with his friend’s mother and visit his grave. While it suffers from the obvious fact that the rift is only seen from one perspective – and Divac’s claim that he would have treated any fan waving a Serbian flag in the same manner tests credibility – it is still a sobering reminder that there all kinds of fatalities in war.