The explanation that the premiere of the film Young and Healthy like a Rose on the 34 th FEST is not a sign of its resurrection, but the confirmation of the change of the disclosure of its meaning, which is in the roots of its youth, which was put forward by Miroljub Vickovic, explains best the fact that Jovan Jovanovic's film appeared on the festival's programme.

“The premiere of the film after 35 years isn't a big deal for me, considering that it was “discovered” by younger generations of film critics. I live in Slovenia and I had no contact with Belgrade ; these young people have found the film and brought in on FEST. In a way, they are the author of the second birth of my film.

I have to thank young critic Danko Jesic, who is the most deserving for my film appearing on FEST, says Jovan Jovanovic.

The film was shown on the Pula film festival in 1971, in the Yugoslav People's Army Dome, for it was too shocking for the Arena. The film was done accordingly to the aesthetics of PUNK, but before PUNK, once said Dejan Vlaisavljevic – Nikt, my younger colleague.

I would observe that it also contains Kemp , in the sense of John Waters, as well as happening; there is everything that makes snobs feels insecure; an epic and lyric spirit of those who like academic stuff, dead aesthetics that is. The film has been seen by a great deal of people in Pula , there were also communist veteran fighters from WWII. I remember one mother (or so she had claimed to be) who was very tolerant to let her daughter watch everything but promised her that she would not let her see my film.

There was also this guy who was a retired state security service agent; he grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me for fifteen minutes, yelling in my face. He claimed that he would have sent me straight to the prison camp on the Goli Otok island, had he not been retired.

On press conference, I was wearing the same shirt as Dragan Nikolic in Young and Healthy like a Rose.

The reactions were utter hysteria of the snobs (I call them “intellectual kitsch” who like “aesthetical things”) and hard line Titoists, who believed that there are “ideal Tito's Pioneers”.

FEST remembers another premiere of a film by Jovanovic; in 1984 his Landscapes in the Midst” had their premiere on our festival and the Zagreb based critic Nenad Polimac branded it one of the three best directed films ever shown. The runner up was an American film, as well the one that earned the third place according to Polimac.

We are hearing the opinion that Young and Healthy like a Rose has anticipated the times in which we live today. Jovanovic says:

It was the remark made by film critic Bogdan Zlatic. He is right; my other films are also like that.

The Student Campus (the first official film I have shot at the Academy, which I didn't even report to censorship authorities, so it wasn't censored, was made in 1965 in Cinema Verité style and it has practically anticipated the spirit and the sensibility of the 1968 generation.

Kolt 15 Gap is a forecast that the working class of the so-called Socialism would ultimately end not in Communism, but in poverty and misery.

The Flowing Revolution had anticipated the precarious and tragic fate of Serbs in Croatia and it was banned by Serbian censors until 1989 for allegedly breaching interethnic relations and not believing in Brotherhood and Unity.

Landscapes in the Mist ( which was preceded by the full-featured documentary Junkies at the end of which a drug addict says that that “drugs will win”) anticipated the global reality of the modern world that is still struggling against illegal drugs.

All my films were done based on a scenario the stories of which didn't come from my head but from researching reality.

I have never written author's scenarios; I think that so-called author's films are tantamount to masturbation. The author's film has nothing to do with reality; it is a snobbish desire to live in a world of beauty and aesthetics. It a belated product of modernism that seems ridiculous in today's post-modernist world. That's why they can't communicate with the larger public. People who are making those films are but mere fakes, not to use a more offending word. They do not like this cruel world of reality. Classic Hollywood films have taught me that films have to be focused on reality. What's more, the viewers want to sense that world, and not those hysterical and sterile authors' worlds.

My problem with ”my dear Belgrade” is that too many snobs live in it, many epic and lyric souls and pure aestheticism lovers; they don't see life and the problems is that these people have always control and still control the media in Serbia. It is because of them that Serbia lost the propaganda war. I have filmed a lot of great footage in Vukovar that has never been aired. It is because such phony characters in the media, the so-called “artists". The truth is that they are unaccomplished writers, painters, musicians, conductors… and they have all ended up in movies” Jovanovic says. As of 1981, he has been lecturing on the best film school in Slovenia several subject matters: film thought-film direction, the dramaturgy of film, film editing, film history and film theory and production. On the Faculty of Pedagogy in Ljubljana , within the framework of postgraduate studies, he teaches The Use of film and Video for Therapeuthical Purposes. In Slovenia is pending the publication of his book Film Opinion – the Basics of Film Direction , while the book Specificities of Film Dramaturgy is also soon to be published.