Despite the common association of the outbreak of World War I with the murder of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, the city and the rest of Bosnia-Herzegovina had the good fortune to be spared the turmoil of war, and avoided being turned into a battlefield. And in spite of the hopes of many Bosnians that the days of the Austro-Hungarian government were numbered, the situation in June 1918, less than five months before the monarchy's collapse, was still calm enough to allow a Viennese film crew to travel undisturbed across the country, occupying, as it were, cities and countryside and transforming these into their film sets. In that summer, ten years after Bosnia had been annexed to the Habsburg Monarchy (1908) and forty since its first occupation by Franz Joseph's troops (1878), two feature films were shot: Die Vila der Narenta (The Vila of the Neretva) and Der Schatzgräber von Blagaj (The Treasure Seeker of Blagaj). The leader of that film crew, Robert Michel – simultaneously co-producer, script writer, artistic supervisor and occasional actor – was an Austrian army major and an established, if not famous, literary author. The film expedition itself had been planned under the aegis of the High Command and its propaganda centre, the Kriegspressequartier, but the films had nothing to do with contemporary war bulletins or front-line documentaries. In fact, they had been conceived as a means to capture the interest of a domestic film-going audience, for whom the war was an annoyance both on and off the screen.