After the War: Life Post-Yugoslavia

Reviewer: Jeremy Hatch
Rating (out of 5): *** overall (**** for Red Rubber Boots and Cowboys in Kosovo)

The nine short documentaries on the After the War: Life Post-Yugoslavia DVD are inevitably dark, given their subject matter: the aftermath of genocide and civil war in the former Yugoslavia. The four films from Serbian director Zelimir Gvardiol are probably the darkest: about an hour of unrelenting grimness (subjects include a man who accidentally killed his wife and a sequence about elderly people waiting to die) makes for important documentary, but it's not something I'd recommend for a first date. Similarly dark is Sheila Sofian's "Conversation with Haris", in which an 11-year-old boy describes the massacre of most of his family to an animated background that illustrates his words.

Jasmila Zbanic's contributions are much richer. "Red Rubber Boots" is a heartbreaking portrait of a mother's quest to find the remains of her children in the mass graves that continue to be discovered all over the country. It's an unforgettable film, but her "Images from the Corner" is essential watching, among the most polished and powerful of these films. When Zbanic was young, a beautiful girl she knew, Bilja, was injured horribly when a mortar shell hit her home -- her father and her dog were killed, and she lost an arm. It happened that a French photojournalist was on the scene, and he took the time to shoot three rolls of film without offering help. This photo, for Zbanic, has always symbolized the start of the war, and the film chronicles her attempt to discover what became of Bilja. She tracks down the photo online, but finds the image obscene and refuses to include it; instead, she trains her camera on the location where Bilja was injured, and leaves it running for the horribly protracted amount of time it would take to use up three rolls of film. It's not so much an indictment of photojournalism as it is an indictment of the inhumanity that war can drive people to.

Zbanic eventually does get in touch with Bilja, who is living in Paris. She leaves a message on Zbanic's answering machine, which is played over a shot of the director being left on the platform of a train station as the camera (on the train) pulls away. Unfortunately, the burned-in subtitles switch from English to Bosnian at that exact moment, so unless you can parse Bilja's heavily-accented and slurred French you're pretty much out of luck. (To paraphrase, I think Bilja says that it's been about ten years since she left Sarajevo never intending to return, and she can't return now although she'd like to, when she's really ready and able.)

The lightest short, and my favorite, was the quirky and polished "Cowboys in Kosovo," by Corinne van Egerat. A man returns home after years abroad, having escaped the war and left his four brothers behind. He wants to reconnect with his siblings, and has an odd plan: since they had grown up on a steady diet of classic American Westerns, he's brought a suitcase full of cowboy costumes, and suggests that his brothers re-enact scenes from their favorite movies. (These re-enactments are presented re-colorized so as to more closely resemble the originals.) In between their re-enactments, the man interviews his brothers about their experiences during the war: one was a child who barely escaped getting shot, two were tortured nearly to death before they escaped to safety, and one was a solider who describes his experiences in broad but horrifying strokes. In the end this short becomes a thoughtful piece about the relationship between child's play and war, between playing at being dead, and killing and being killed. "A plastic gun is the shadow of a real gun," one brother says. "Where there is a shadow, there is a tree." It's a line that provokes goosebumps.

The only real miss on the entire DVD is the unbearably pretentious "House of Wisdom" by Roberto Forns-Broggi, a mere thirteen minutes that's still hard to stay put for, and which includes both a director's commentary (!) and a written statement. Frankly, it isn't even that well-filmed to begin with.

The DVD had multiple authoring issues -- you have to manually return to the root menu after each film, and the subtitles were burned in with sometimes disastrous results, as noted above -- but otherwise navigation worked well. Owing to the source materials, video quality was sometimes poor, but the whole collection is worth checking out just for "Cowboys in Kosovo" and "Images from the Corner".