Croatian TV Risks Row Over Serbian Film

RTL Croatia says it will air the Serbian film “Zika’s Dynasty” on January 29 without Croatian subtitles.

The decision comes after Croatia’s Council for Electronic Media earlier this month asked the broadcaster to translate the popular movie from Serbian to Croatian, two nearly identical languages.

The council acted after an anonymous viewer complained when RTL aired the popular pre-war Serbian movie “Tight Skin” without Croatian subtittles.

After receiving a warning from the council, RTL initially withdrew plans to broadcast “Zika’s dinasty”, but later announced it would air the movie. RTL also called on the council to resign.

If the station goes through with its plan to air the film without subtitles, the regulatory council could revoke RTL’s operating license.

The Croatian public, meanwhile, has overwhelmingly condemned the council’s warning. “This is a scandalous nationalistic incident which testifies to the absolute incompetency of the council,” movie director Hrvoje Hribar, director of the state-funded Croatian Audiovisual Centre, HAVC, said.

HAVC noted that Croatian law excludes movies aired in national minority languages from any translation obligations. “That means that a Serbian movie can be aired without subtitles,” the Centre argued in a press statement.

Croatia’s Culture Ministry has indicated that it cannot interfere in the council’s work because it is an independent regulatory body.

However, the Ministry has suggested that “certain inconsistencies” in applying the law on electronic media could be avoided.

That law obliges media services to air their progammes in the Croatian language and Latin alphabet, or translate them into Croatian.

The catch is that Croatian and Serbian languages, according to many linguists, are essentially the same language, with minor grammatical differences.

Croatian linguist Snjezana Kordic, who recently published the noted book “Language and Nationalism”, writes that “Croatian and Serbian are a singular polycentric language”.

In the former Yugoslavia, the two languages were treated as one, called Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian.

But the language question is sensitive in the former Yugoslavia, where it is linked to the ethnic conflicts of the 1990s.

The situation has been met with irony by some Croatian commentators. One noted that if the Croatian media adhere to the regulatory council’s request, the statements of Serbian President Boris Tadic would have to be subtitled for Croatian viewers.