Line of Life
Every new line led him closer to death, but it was also what kept him alive
In the autumn of 1944, Miloš Bajić was forcibly transported to the Mauthausen concentration camp, just after beginning his studies at art school in Belgrade. Registered with the chilling label “RETURN UNDESIRABLE,” he became a silent witness to the horrors of the Holocaust. Despite the constant threat of death, Bajić secretly documented the atrocities of the Nazis, capturing the brutal treatment of fellow prisoners and the horrific daily life inside the camp. His drawings, which he hid in fear of being executed if discovered, became not only a record of the horrors he endured but also the sole thing that kept him alive. In the face of unspeakable suffering, it was his art that gave him the strength to survive.
Festivals
Golden Remy Award 2019- WorldFest Huston Film Festival.
Award for the Best Documentary film 2019- Association of Film Artist of Serbia.
Selected for the EFA Documentary Film Selection of annual Awards of European Film Academy of 2020.
In Mauthausan concentration camp, Miloš Bajić covertly found ways to create amid the worst of circumstances. “The hardest thing was preserving the drawings and avoiding the Krauts' discovering them, because if that happened, we would have been executed immediately” explains Ljubomir, a fellow survivor who assisted Bajić. When he emerged from Mauthausan, Bajić’s style was transformed: “I did not want to be just a number again. I changed my artistic views and reinforced the conviction that the artist's freedom was the first requirement of authentic creativity”. For Bajić, freedom emerges in every moment of his artistic creation, and is what his art truly champions: "Nowadays, there are a great many possible styles: fantasy, cubism, abstraction…but it all makes one group from which one can move freely: freely, as when a cosmonaut goes to the cosmos.”
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