Havana Marking on SMASH AND GRAB: THE STORY OF THE PINK PANTHERS

Diamonds are forever. For the notorious Pink Panthers, they simply mean good cash. They are the subject of the new documentary by Havana Marking, who followed up her award winning and widely acclaimed Afghan Star feature with Smash and Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers about a ring of diamond thieves with roots implanted in former Yugoslavian territory who were responsible for around five hundred robberies worth three hundred million dollars. The film had its Irish premiere at this year’s Stranger Than Fiction Documentary Film Festival at the IFI.

“I had heard about them before, but it was an article about them in the New Yorker that led me to joining all the dots and gaining all the layers of history and everything around them,” she told the audience in attendance at the talk that took place after the screening. “That’s what led me to believe that I had a killer story and one that would fit the feature length format.”

One of the things that makes Smash and Grab so insightful and ultimately rewarding is that she was able to interview two members of The Pink Panthers, Mike and Lela. Yet, according to Marking, meeting them wasn’t the difficult part. “It was the journalist who had written the article that replied to my e-mail and gave me some numbers. It then took years of going back and forth to get them to trust me and for me to trust them. Montenegro is quite small and everyone kind of know each other, it’s whether those people are actually willing to talk to you.”

To find out more about the The Pink Panthers, she also examined the troubled socio-political environment of Yugoslavia, from its idyllic and almost miraculously peaceful unity under Tito’s rule to the spiteful and violent separation which took place after his death. This follows a trait in Marking’s films, where she explores geographical, historical and cultural elements and examines their effects on the individuals and the lifestyle choices that they make. “I am a believer in things not just happening. There are reasons why historically things are created and that period of complete collapse and criminalization of the state with the sanctions just kind of ramping it on top just created an unbelievable criminal aspect that we are still living in. I think it’s interesting to me that when everyone talks about Kosovo and Bosnia they talk about successful intervention. In so very many ways it was, but there are things that you can see many years later that say that it wasn’t and that also say that yes, we did kind of contribute to the criminal activity.

Smash and grab also comes across as fresh and modern. Indeed, it is as exciting if not more than narrative films which make use of the same subjects. This contemporary, accessible and exciting feel is achieved with a great mixture of techniques, archive footage, interviews and, perhaps most strikingly, animation. “The animation idea was developed early on. With documentary you get used to having a lot of room and sometimes you tell yourself that you could even let a certain scene go on for, say, five more minutes. When you tell the animators they freak out because that means seven men in a room for a week to cover your new cut which may just be a thirty second piece. Animation allows you to be so creative and yet you have to be so disciplined, you have to script everything to the second.”

With the Panthers still making headlines around the world with their outrageous diamond heists, this film is sure to be of interest. By using a creative approach both visually and thematically, Marking truly achieves a right balance in entertainment and insight, as well as a certain humanisation of the figure of the robber, without over doing it and revealing them as modern Robin Hood figures, while still playing around imaginatively with the familiar cinematic elements of film noir and action films.