Urban Belgrade myths: Belgrade phantom (Beogradski fantom)
Belgrade Phantom (Serbian: Beogradski Fantom) is a nickname of the guy who night after night repeatedly managed to run away in a white Porsche from the cops who were driving their Zastava’s in the late seventies. His real name was Vlada Vasiljevic, a small time crook apparently very good in stealing cars and with particular obsession with fancy and expensive sport cars such as Porsche. These stunts made him famous in at that time communisticaly boring Belgrade and the people would gather every night around Slavija square waiting for him to do his show and to escape Narodna Milicija one more time.
Here’s a short documentary film about the event by Jovan B. Todorovic, who is also preparing a movie about this event.
Cvijus has reminded me of this short documentary that i too found some time ago, but completely forgot about it because of the site redesign. Very interesting story, because of the events, political and cultural implications, but also due to the fact that there are so many interpretations of this event on the internet that nobody can really tell all the details. I am particulary interested if the movie makers managed to dig up the real facts so we can get a bit closer to the truth.
Here’s what i managed to find while browsing through the internet.
The stolen car in question vary from Porsche 924 to some versions of 911, and on some places people claim that he had several models during those 10 nights he made circles around Slavija.
Some say that he stole the vehicle from Goran Bregovic, others that he stole it from the Danish ambassy, some say the the car had German license plates and that the original owner was Croatian tennis player Nikola Pilic.
Reason for doing this is also unclear: some say that he hated the communist regime and wanted to beat it in this symbolic way, others that he simply hated cops and wanted to make them look bad, and some even say that he did it because he was bored. Best version say that he did it for a girl and that he would pick one rose every night from the center of Slavija square, while he was running from the cops.
Vlada died few years after he went out of prison, in an old Russian Lada – stolen.
The movie is in post production for a long time now, as i have heard, hope it won’t have the same problems as that Chinese movie from couple of days ago or Mlad i zdrav kao ruza some 35 years ago.
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What a superb story. I had never heard of the Belgrade Phantom before and I half expected it to involve a ghostly lady who killed herself.
This story reminded me of the Claude Lelouch’s famous classic “C‘était un rendez-vous”. Jerry Kindall explains:
“On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris. The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur.
No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.
The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 MPH in some stretches. The footage reveals him running real red lights, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up real one-way streets.
Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground until a DVD release a few years ago.”
See it on YouTube over here
Kind regards
Jonathan
Limbic nutrition
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