Once Brothers

Vlade Divac and Drazen Petrovic were teammates and best friends on Yugoslavia's national basketball team and helped to pave the way for European stars to journey to the NBA.  Both were heroes in their native countries and helped each other to deal with the fame they achieved.  However, with Divac experiencing immediate success as the starting center for the Lakers and Petrovic riding the bench his rookie season, the two started to grow apart.  The relationship was then ultimately severed by the political tension back home.  Civil war broke out in Yugoslavia in 1991.  Petrovic was Croatian and Divac was Serbian, leaving the former friends on separate sides of the war and causing contempt to grow between them.  The two grew in skill in popularity in the NBA separately, Divac waiting for the right moment to come for the two to reconcile.  That moment never came.  Petrovic died in a fatal car crash on the way to a national game back in Croatia.  Michael Tolajian directed the documentary Once Brothers, chronicling this moving story.  Vlade Divac himself narrates the film and gives a first hand perspective to the film.  The documentary was distributed by ESPN as part of their 30 for 30 documentary series.

In order to draw the emotional response from the audience that was desired, the film first decides to introduce the main characters of the film to the audience.  The chronological order that the film was presented in was effective because it helped the film make sense logically and allowed the viewer to experience the players’ lives from the beginning.  The setting of the film was mainly in modern day Serbia and Croatia, where Divac recounts the events.  This makes the film much more personal by showing the roots of the characters and also allowing Divac to visit families and people who lived through the Civil War.  Much of the story was told from a coffee shop or homes of the players, establishing a sense of friendliness in the film.  Since the speakers in the film commonly used a foreign language, text was used to translate.  The choice to not dub the voices enabled raw emotion to show in the speakers. The documentary also does a good job of keeping both the basketball context and the political context consistent and paralleled throughout the film.  This is very important because the eventual break up of the friends occurs because of the political division.  This is done subtly and mostly through comments that the cast makes, foreshadowing the events of the film without giving them away.  Background knowledge is provided both about the Yugoslavian team and the state of Yugoslavia after World War II. 

When retelling the story of the careers of Divac and Petrovic, a lot of archival footage is used both of interviews and of games.  Old interviews are the only way to incorporate Petrovic’s input into the film, and the old games give the viewers a sense of how sensational the Yugoslavians actually were.  Later, to tell the story of the Civil War, archival footage was used to show the devastation.  The Yugoslavian Civil War was the worst fighting in Europe since WWII, and the documentary uses images to show the viewers how horrible it actually was.  Injured babies and crying mothers were shown, establishing pathos.  Explosions and aftermath were shown to further the effect.  For a technical understanding, maps were added that explained the war.  With all of this devastation, however, the mood needed to be lightened.  This was done mostly by the characters in the film and their dialogue.  For example, Magic Johnson opened his conversation by stating, “All I want is a Coke and a burger.”  In addition, the change in mood was cued by the music playing in the background.  Ultimately, all of the rhetorical choices were made to focus on the relationship of the players.  Basketball wasn’t the main focus of the text, just the background.  Divac and Tolajian created the documentary to recount the loss of a friendship and the hatred that arose from sectionalism in the divided Yugoslavia of the ‘90’s. 

Once Brothers. Dir. Michael Tolajian. Perf. Vlade Divac. ESPN, 2010. Online Film.