Caves

A film by Oliver Ciric

Damin, a Romani teenager, is training as a boxer in order to defend his village from an expanding Chinese copper mine in Eastern Serbia.

Bor, Serbia. The Chinese company Zijin has bought out the copper mines, expanding them to swallow homes, town centers, and entire villages. The most recent victim of this expansion is the Romani village of Zmajevo, a settlement that has come to be encircled by the mines. Inspired by the mine that has encircled them, many of the Romani have taken it upon themselves to train boxing in order to protect themselves. Now, Zmajevo is under the threat of destruction as Zijin has secured the rights to the land upon which it lies.

Filmic Methods & Visual Style: With our film, we hope to reflect the agency these children seek through a participatory method where the subjects themselves are given a camera to film their experiences. The end result will be a film that combines first-hand experiences filmed by the kids with an observatory perspective by the filmmaker.

Tone: The people of Zmajevo speak from deeply personal and often conflicting perspectives, and without independent evidence, many of their claims cannot be corroborated. Rather than trying to resolve those contradictions, we want to embrace them. By allowing people to speak for themselves, the film creates a deliberately subjective environment in which memory, rumor, fear, and resentment all become part of the reality we are documenting. In that sense, the film is not ultimately about whether Chinese companies are “taking over” the mines or the village. It is about the way a community constructs a narrative to make sense of enormous changes happening around it. And, hopefully, how that narrative can become meaningful regardless of whether every part of it is objectively true.

Sound will play an important role in expressing this tension.We want the film to move between these extremes, contrasting the overwhelming sounds of the mines to the pointed punches of the boxers, while allowing the camera to hypnotically linger when it matters. Our aim is a film that feels propulsive without being relentless—immersive in its rhythms, but patient enough to let the people of Zmajevo define the world on their own terms.

Future Subjects: he current film that we shot moves through the narratives of the children, the boxers, and the common laborers of Zmajevo, however, one missing link remains: the Chinese miners themselves. The mines that have transformed the village often feel strangely distant, more like a presence hanging over daily life than something constantly seen or heard. In the same way that the camera becomes personal for the Romani in this village, we hope to create a dialectic with the new Chinese presence that has arrived in this village, seeking to capture the entire spirit of Zmajevo.

In collaboration with our project, we have hired a Chinese translator and are in contact with the media liaison of the Zijin mines to set up interviews with the miners themselves.

About the Filmmaker:

Oliver Ciric is a Serbian-American filmmaker based in Boston, MA. He’s a recent film production graduate of Emerson College, where he worked on a variety of award-winning films. His feature length documentary The Bird (Or: Marty, Clown) (2021) premiered in-competition at the 14th Beldocs IFF, where he was the youngest filmmaker to have a film in competition. His recent short film, “The Noblemen,” is currently in the film festival circuit.

Director’s Statement:

In February of 2025, with the increasing political pressure of student protests, the Serbian government announced that it was going to reinstate a mandatory military draft. Living in the US, I was given an ultimatum: renounce my Serbian citizenship or pay a heavy fine. It was a shocking realization that Serbdom, an identity that I’ve held my entire life, could simply be revoked due to a distant political reality. However, my estrangement with Serbia was nothing new. For nearly my entire life, I’ve been falling out of love with the ethos of being Serbian, watching the country slowly slip into a Neo-Colonial status as political and economic decadence come to reign.

Having recently graduated film school, I decided to explore the meaning of my Serbian identity. I wondered: What does it mean to love a country in an age of hegemony and globalization?

Like many other filmmakers, my research eventually led to the historically significant copper mining town of Bor, Serbia. Bor was one of the first outposts of French investments in the Balkans; a priority for the Nazis during the invasion of Yugoslavia; a poignant setting for pioneering Yugoslavian artists such as Dušan Makajavev. Today, it assessed to be one of the largest copper deposits in the world. I saw Bor as a city that continues to hold its status as the weathervane for Serbia, as the town rapidly becomes an outpost for Chinese Neo-colonialism.

With open arms, I was invited into the Romani community of Zmajevo, a village that doesn’t even appear on maps nor government censuses. I heard tales of conflicting identities, a helpless political situation, and an uncertain future. In these children, I saw myself, conflicted with my own identity and yearning for a Serbia that is long gone.

Filming in the village one day, Damin emerged from his home, walked into my frame, proudly proclaiming “I am a boxer! Watch me fight!” Seeing the bold charisma and perseverance of this young man, I knew I had a story that must be told.

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Caves

A film by Oliver Ciric

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