BLUM – Masters of their own destiny

BA 2024, 75 min, Jasmila Žbanic

After the Second World War, in devastated, rural Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country of illiterate people, the entrepreneur Emerik Blum created a large and successful global company, "Energoinvest," that operated worldwide with a billion dollars in profit. Taking advantage of the specific position of Yugoslavia that was between East and West, socialism and capitalism, the company operated on a worldwide unique business model based on the workers’ participation in management and profit. Blum turned a small engineering atelier into a great company success by operating under the self-management model. The self-management model is a system in which all employees in a factory or enterprise decide on everything concerning their company. This most democratic model worked excellently in this case but is largely unknown today. Through interviews with contemporaries who knew Blum, his workers, as well as archive interviews with himself, the film paints a portrait of a genius man and a story about a special time. The way Blum thought and worked today seems like science fiction!

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Festivals

Director´s Fortnight FF 2025, US | Zagreb Dox 2025, HR I Bosnian FF 2025, US I Jewish Film Festival Berlin Brandenburg 2025, DE I Beldocs 2025 RS