The idea to head down south to the countries that use the same family of languages as us and share the slavic culture with us has been on our list for a while already. We always looked at the Balkans as just a rougher, more brutal version of the Czech Republic - culture-wise but also architecture-wise - which is mainly what was so attractive to us. After seeing a bunch of viral videos of those concrete monsters, Soviet flats and brutalistic architecture, we knew that these cities will be a treasure for sick spots that we want to film at. That’s when Mikeš (who usually plans the itinerary for all our trips) started his research on the former Yugoslav countries.

Mikeš: I started the research in September 2023 by mapping down potential filming spots and what caught my attention absolutely the most were the stunning weird looking monuments. As I was sinking deep into databases, historical books, forums and communities I realized that all these sculptures share one major fact together, all of these spomeniks (Serbian for “monument”) had been built for the partisans that fought for liberating Yugoslavia in WWII. I created a map and pinned down possible routes that would cover all the spomeniks also with the major cities along the way. Finding the locations of some of these spomeniks was a great challenge because some weren’t even in Google Maps and could only be found under coordinates that were in some forgotten databases. After my research was done, I presented the trip to the rest of the group. We were discussing the concept of the video but also the great dilemma - is it even ethical to do parkour at these monuments? We had a 3 hour long discussion on this topic that led to an unsure closure - 50% of us were for it, 50% of us against it. There was one thing that we all could agree on though - we will make the decision only when we’re over there standing in front of the monuments. If you have watched Jugo Grad already, you know our final decision. Let me cover some of the reasons for why we decided to go for it.

One of the main architects behind most of these monuments (Bogdan Bogdanovic) said that he created them in a way so they would commemorate the historical act but in a neutral way - not to celebrate the victory nor to mourn the fallen. The truth is that whenever we arrived at any of these monuments, we did immediately feel the power, respect, epicness and robustness of the sight but never a sense of worship, sadness or tragedy, even though thousands of people may have died at this sight. In fact we felt so safe around these sights that we camped right next to them a bunch of times. Bogdanovic also said that he built these sculptures for people to interact with them, so we did, in our own way. Fun fact, Bogdanovic said that the best feedback to his art he’s ever received was by a woman that told him that her child was conceived at one of his monuments.

Did we ever meet a local that would be angry at us for jumping on the monuments? Never, the locals were mostly surprised that someone even came to their ends just to see these mostly crumbling shapes of concrete next to their house. Another factor that helped us to justify us jumping on the monuments was the community of the descendents of the partisans. During my research I came across a bunch of forums, groups, Instagram accounts and podcasts, that claimed to be part of a small but worldwide community that was sharing stories about their ancestors that fought in the war on the partisan side. One of the topics they were talking about is how are the spomeniks gaining popularity and are more and more attractive for tourists. What I often read in these groups about this topic was that they think that it’s great that more people are visiting these sights now but only as long as they also study something about the history. What they find disrespectful is when someone travels to these places just to get a selfie and nothing else. So I did study the history and on top of that, I brought a book and documents from which I was reading along the way, educating others about the history of every single monument we visited. In fact, I have so much knowledge in my brain about WWII in Yugoslavia, I don’t even know what to do with it now.

This project took one whole month of filming every day. At one point there were 14 of us traveling together in 3 cars, sleeping mostly outside in the woods and fields. Besides all of these monuments that were mostly located in rural areas, we also filmed in cities like Zagreb, Belgrade, Skopje, Pristina, Podgorica and Sarajevo. Everyone on the crew was trying to stay as much motivated as they could get during 40 degree heats during the day. Huge respect belongs especially to the only woman on the crew Kačka Krčmářová, for being one of the few that stayed throughout the whole trip and managed to deliver the most clips out of everyone else!

Going through all footage of 5 different cameras was a long but exciting work. While editing JG I knew that I want not to mix the street clips with the monument clips, what I ended up having though, after completing the rough cut, was two very different looking videos - one being a pretty conventional street parkour video and on the other side an epic monument video with a completely different vibe. As we were  thinking about how to link them into one cohesive video we thought of an idea of a rewritten tape. With a help from Jaroslav Maléř and his VFX effects we were trying to bring a vibe, that the video has been on a tape where the monument part has been over-recorded by the street video.

While filming Jugo Grad it was also our first time we invited a photographer to document the whole process, our friend Petr Žemla. Using his own pictures and also other’s he coordinated the gallery at this year’s Holding Hands and also created a photobook called Imprints.