THE FORGOTTEN GRAND PRIX OF 1939

The German name von Brauchitsch still rouses associations, but nowadays few people know anything about the career of the motor-racing driver Manfred von Brauchitsch, who died in 2002 at the age of 97. Taking the sportsman’s funeral as the starting point of his documentary, Dinko Tucaković, director of the Belgrade Film Museum, centres on the first Yugoslavian Grand Prix in Belgrade in 1939, a long-forgotten race which was once associated with von Brauchitsch’s name. Staged in the era of such famous racing drivers as Caracciola, Rosemeyer or Nuvolaria, this major sporting event was overshadowed by the outbreak of World War II. Tucaković interviewed eye-witnesses, and unearthed breathtaking footage of magnificent men in machines flying round the hilly circuit of the Kalemegdan, Belgrade’s ancient fortifications.