How a Serbian Film About World War II Got Caught in a Modern-Day Political Crossfire

Before anyone had even seen Heroes of Halyard, it was already engulfed in scandal.

At an industry presentation at the Sarajevo Film Festival‘s CineLink forum in August, Telekom Srbija, which produced Heroes of Halyard together with Contrast Studios, screened clips of the World War II epic. The film, from Serbian actor and director Radoš Bajić, was still in post-production and the clips were only meant to give the audience a sense of the scope of the production, one of the biggest and most ambitious films ever made in the region.

Instead, they sparked a political backlash. Some accused the film, which tells the story of the historic rescue of American airmen by Serbian fighters in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia in 1944, of glorifying Serbian nationalist groups. Benjamina Karic, the mayor of Sarajevo, called the film “revisionist” and demanded festival organizers distance themselves from the producers and the screening, which they promptly did.

Karic continued to throw oil on the fire, tweeting that the film caused “immeasurable damage to the festival and the City of Sarajevo.”

All this for a film no one had seen yet. It would be months later before Heroes of Halyard had its official world premiere, in the Serbian capital, Belgrade, on Oct. 10. It first screened for an international audience at the Black Nights Film Festival in Tallinn, Estonia in November.

On its surface, there’s nothing particularly controversial about Heroes of Halyard. The film explores an almost-forgotten corner of World War II history: the audacious and true tale of Operation Halyard, a rescue operation, organized by America’s war-time espionage agency the OSS, to use Serbian resistance fighters to help save American and Allied airmen trapped behind enemy lines in the dying days of the war. The forces, led by Serbian general Draža Mihailović, saved more than 500 airmen and personnel, the largest rescue operation of American airmen in history.

The rescue is at the center of the film, but Heroes of Halyard is also a tale of Serbian history, in particular the complex, messy period during German occupation. Director Bajić structures the film as the story of three brothers, stand-ins for political movements at the time, whose lives are torn between conflicting ideologies. Mirko joins Mihailović’s pro-nationalist Yugoslav Army, often known as the Chetniks. Brother Sreten throws in with the communist Partisans under Marshal Tito. Youngest son Ilija is caught in between.

“The film is really a story of the civil war, the story of communities torn apart, families torn apart,” says lieutenant colonel John Cappello, a consultant on Heroes of Halyard. The 25-year U.S. Air Force veteran is president of the Halyard Mission Foundation, a group set up to “educate, commemorate and increase awareness” of the Halyard mission and the role the Serbs played in its success. “The civil war,” says Cappello, “was extremely complex.”

Complex because while Chetniks — a catch-all term for nationalist and royalist forces, not all of whom were under Mihailović’s command — and Partisans both fought the Nazi occupiers, they also fought each other. Tito’s Partisans were allied with the Soviet Union and envisioned a communist future for Yugoslavia. Mihailović wanted to re-establish the Yugoslav monarchy. There are allegations on both sides of collaboration or coordination with Axis troops, the stuff of fierce historical debates that continue to this day.

After the war, and the defeat of general Mihailović’s forces by Tito’s, Mihailović was tried and convicted of high treason by the new communist Yugoslav government and executed by firing squad. His conviction was only overturned posthumously in 2015, with the Serbian supreme court ruling that Mihailović’s trial and conviction were politically and ideologically motivated.

A year and a half after his execution, U.S. President Harry S. Truman awarded Mihailović the U.S. Legion of Merit for his role in leading Operation Halyard. In his speech, President Truman said Mihailović and the forces under his command “were instrumental in obtaining a final Allied victory.”

All that history is relevant because, in the Balkans, the battle over conflicting interpretations of Serbian history is a key part of modern political debates. The controversy over Heroes of Halyard in Sarajevo had less to do with the film’s content, or even with a historical debate over the role of General Mihailović and the Chetniks, than with the politics of the current moment.

When Sarajevo Mayor Karic tweeted about Heroes of Halyard, she connected Mihailović (who she called a “convicted war criminal”) to Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadzic, two Bosnian Serb leaders found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity in part for their role in the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre during the Bosnian war that ravaged the region in the 1990s. Karic was using the experience of the ’90s war to frame the World War II history depicted in the film. She isn’t the first to make the connection. Some of those Serbian nationalist groups in the ’90s also called themselves Chetniks, in honor of the World War II fighters.

“Chetnik just means something like guerilla fighter but it’s a term that’s been misused and is the source of a lot of very emotional responses today,” says Cappello. “The term means very different things to different people. There are Chetnik groups in the United States today, in Chicago, in San Diego, whose fathers and grandfathers fought with general Mihailović, resisting the Germans. And they see Chetniks as heroes. … I would argue this story, the rescue of these American airmen was a moment when there was coordination and cooperation, even among the groups that were fighting each other. Partisan forces assisted the Chetnik forces, the Royalist forces, to save Americans.”

The producers of Heroes of Halyard, and many in the American government, would like to frame the story of the film as an example of, in Cappello’s words, “the 140 years of strong diplomatic relations between the United States and Serbia,” avoiding the “aberration” of the ’90s, where the U.S. and Serbia were at odds, with Washington viewing Belgrade as the primary aggressor in the wars that tore up Yugoslavia. Diplomatic relations between the two countries reached a historic low point in 1999 when the U.S. led a NATO bombing campaign against Serbian forces to force them to withdraw from the disputed region of Kosovo.

“When you talk to Serbians these days about America, the prominent thought is: ‘You bombed us. You bombed us, NATO, NATO, NATO,’” says Cappello. “I think overcoming those negative narratives without ignoring them is important.”

“The U.S.-Serbia relationship is about so much more than the conflicts of the 1990s. For much of our history — and as this film illustrates — we were allies,” said Christopher Hill, the U.S. ambassador to Serbia, in an email reply to The Hollywood Reporter.

Cappello believes that the negative image “of the role Serbs played in the 1990s” in the Balkans has obscured the deep historical ties between Serbia and the United States.

“Serbs were the only ones in this region that could say that they were allies [of the U.S.] during both world wars. And they suffered tremendously for that,” he notes.

This American framing of Heroes of Halyard has its own, very current, political overtones. Since the 1990s and Serbia’s diplomatic break with the U.S., Russia has made inroads in the region. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, whose populist Serbian Progressive Party won a sweeping victory in snap parliamentary elections on Sunday, Dec. 17, has been accused of cozying up to Vladimir Putin, refusing to impose sanctions on Russia in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine and calling Russia Serbia’s “traditional friend.” Serbia has been a candidate for European Union membership since 2014, but Vucic’s Moscow-friendly stance has not helped Belgrade’s efforts. Many in Europe, and many in Washington, would balk at the idea of another pro-Russia government in the EU alongside Victor Orban’s Hungary.

For those who would prefer to see Belgrade look west, Heroes of Halyard provides a convenient historical narrative, a look back at a time when the U.S. and Serbia stood side by side.

“Films like this show us that, working together as partners, we can achieve the impossible,” said Hill. “I hope this film reminds anyone who sees it of what we achieved when we were allies. I hope it makes them realize how much we will achieve when — not if, but when — we are allies once again.”