
Bringing Down a Dictator
Serbia, 2000: a student movement called Otpor sets out to do what NATO bombs could not, remove Slobodan Milosevic from power without firing a shot. The film follows the young organizers who built the campaign from scratch, teaching volunteers nonviolent tactics borrowed from Gandhi and the American civil rights movement, spray-painting the clenched-fist symbol on walls across the country, and staging street theater designed to make the police look ridiculous rather than threatening. Interviews with Otpor members sit alongside archival news footage of the disputed September election, the general strike that followed, and the crowds that finally stormed the parliament building in Belgrade in October. The film traces how a scattered opposition, fractured for years, was pushed by students and independent media into a single coalition capable of contesting the vote and defending the result in the streets. It is a case study in organizing under a police state, showing the meetings, the printing of leaflets, and the arrests that came before the final, decisive days when Milosevic's own security forces refused to fire.