Alternative Film Guide

Directed by John Ealer and Laura Bialis (above, lower photo), View from the Bridge: Stories from Kosovo, described on the film’s official website as "the first documentary feature about post-war Kosovo" was recently screened at the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

The bridge in question is located in the town of Mitrovica, which has become a flashpoint in the ethno-cultural clashes between Muslim Albanians, Christian Serbs, and Roma (Gypsies). In order to portray the differences — and similarities — among those disparate groups, Ealer and Bialis opted for a personal approach to their subject matter. Thus, View from the Bridge relies on first-person accounts — "sometimes hopeful, sometimes tragic" — of the lives of those suffering the physical and emotional consequences of the politics of divisiveness.

Among others who worked on the project are American Society of Cinematographers’s Heritage Award winner Sarah Levy, Academy Award-nominated editor William Haugse (Hoop Dreams), and composer Miriam Cutler, whose credits include Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and Chris & Don. A Love Story.

Directors Ealer ("JE") and Bialis ("LB") have kindly agreed to take part in a brief q&a via e-mail, discussing the making of the documentary, the difficulties they encountered while filming in Kosovo, and the significance of View from the Bridge not only for Kosovars but also for people elsewhere.

(View from the Bridge DVDs are available for sale at www.kosovomovie.com.)

Photos: © Sirena Films

First of all, could you tell us a little about your professional background?

JE: I’m a director of photography and director of commercials, television, and documentaries; View from the Bridge is my first feature doc, it was really a passion project for me. I have a BA in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa and a MFA in Film Production from the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

LB: I went to Stanford and followed that by getting an MFA at USC as well — which is where I met John. I made my first feature doc, Tak for Alt: Survival of a Human Spirit [about civil-rights activist and Holocaust survivor Judy Meisel], while I was at USC. Simultaneously with producing View from the Bridge, I was working on another feature doc called Refusenik. That film, the first documentary to chronicle the three-decade-long grassroots struggle to free Soviet Jews, premiered in December in Jerusalem, so I’ve been busy, to say the least.

How did you become involved with View from the Bridge? What is the movie about?

JE: View from the Bridge is about what happens after the bombs stop falling. It’s an intimate, first-person look at the people of Kosovo as they try to overcome the powerful legacy of the politics of hate and division. When we started making this film, here at home there was talk of "culture war" and "red and blue states" — the US was preoccupied with what I call the politics of division. Kosovo seemed a good place to look at the extreme ramifications of such politics — at the very least, it’s a cautionary tale of where such politics can lead.

LB: I first got interested in post-war Kosovo when I met an amazing UN worker named Diane Brown. Every time she came back from Kosovo, I would talk to her and hear about its struggle — and failure — to recover both politically and societally. I think that in the West we tend to think we’ve escaped tribalism, that we’ve somehow moved beyond it. But with the disintegration of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, I think we pretty clearly see that when politics fuels polarization, no society is immune to violence.

Now, could you explain a little about the conflict in Kosovo — its origins and what it represents today.

JE: The conflict is centuries old, and its origins are really shrouded by national myth and revisionist history. The history of the region is so contentious and so hotly debated that we have to be very careful in describing it.

We know for sure that ethnic Albanians and Serbs have always lived in Kosovo, though their numbers and proportions have changed over the years. And we know that Kosovo was a very important part of the Serbian heartland at the height of the medieval Serbian Kingdom around the 13th and 14th centuries. Serbs see it as the cradle of their civilization, they often describe it as their "Jerusalem." Many of the important religious sites of the Serbian Orthodox Church are in Kosovo as well. When the Ottoman Empire overran Kosovo starting around the late 14th Century, part of the population slowly converted to Islam. Over time, Albanians converted in greater numbers than Serbs, so most Albanians today are Muslim, while most Serbs are Christian.

There were outbreaks of violence between the groups over the years, but after World War II Marshall Josip Broz Tito’s autocratic central rule of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) kept things relatively quiet — and relatively prosperous. Under the last constitution of the FRY, drafted in the ’70s, Kosovo was not a republic but an "autonomous province" that had its own government but still was part of Serbia. Though this may seem to be a fine distinction, it is really the seed of the current debate on Kosovo’s status. The Yugoslav republics (like Bosnia and Croatia) had a constitutional right to decide their own status (i.e., had the right of self-determination) if and when the FRY ever dissolved, while, technically speaking, an autonomous province like Kosovo did not.

Slobodan Milosevic took power in the late ’80s, and during his rule he effectively revoked the autonomous status of Kosovo and, by all accounts, subjected Kosovar Albanians to myriad kinds of political, physical, and economic repression. Kosovar Albanians lost their jobs, weren’t allowed to go to university, were subject to special taxes, etc. (For instance, there was a fee that people in Kosovo had to pay to register with the government and get their IDs. The Serbian government kept changing street names so the Albanians in Kosovo would have to pay this fee over and over again. The street names changed so often they lost meaning. To this day, there are only two streets in the capital city of Pristina that have names anyone knows: one is Mother Theresa Blvd, and the other is Bill Clinton Blvd.)

By the time of Milosevic’ rule, the population of Kosovo was about 80% Albanian. (Exact figures are really hard to come by.) The political leadership of Kosovo actually adopted a pacifist stance — hoping to be rewarded by the international community for keeping violence at bay — while ethnic violence tore apart Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia. But by 1998, an Albanian guerilla group called the Kosovo Liberation Army was formed and started engaging the Serb forces in Kosovo. The Serb army cracked down quite brutally, and a massive wave of Albanian refugees fled many reported atrocities. Fearing a humanitarian catastrophe, NATO bombed Serbian forces in Kosovo and Serbia proper for 78 days in 1999 to stop the ethnic violence.

The UN has administered Kosovo since then, so the province has kind of been in a political limbo. If you live there you get a passport that says "UNMIK - United Nations Mission in Kosovo." Technically, it’s still part of Serbia, but Serbia really has very little administrative control over the area, though it does have a great deal of influence in northern Kosovo. Recently, a former KLA commander, Hasim Thaci, was elected prime minister, and he has pledged to declare Kosovo a fully independent state within the near future.

LB: To some extent, Kosovo has now become a kind of political football between the US and the EU on one side and Russia on the other. Many are trying to project what happens in Kosovo as a template for other "breakaway" regions like Chechnya in Russia and Abkhazia in Georgia. So there’s been a lot of attention worldwide on the final status talks on Kosovo.

Did you plan beforehand how you’d approach the subject of ethnic violence — or did you develop new insights while shooting the documentary?

JE: Our plan was really quite simple. We wanted to let the people of Kosovo speak for themselves. We didn’t want to have commentators, historians, or politicians speak on their behalf.

LB: We knew that both sides were really quite isolated; they had totally divergent views on the conflict, and neither side really wanted to admit that they had done anything wrong. So we felt that even though Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo weren’t communicating, we could at least juxtapose their viewpoints, and in that juxtaposition, create a good sense of the place. In a way, our idea was to create a dialogue in the film that didn’t exist in the place itself.

JE: The metaphor we went into the film with was a stained glass window. We knew we could collect distinctive and sharply disparate facets of Kosovo, and that it we carefully organized them, we could create a powerful simulacrum — or at least a beautiful sketch — of what Kosovo was really like.

What was it like to make a movie in Kosovo, one of the world’s most volatile areas?

LB: Kosovo used to be extremely volatile; production of the film was actually delayed over a year because of outbreaks of violence. When we filmed in 2005, there definitely was some tension there, but it didn’t really feel that unsafe.

JE: Some people told us we should bring flak jackets on the shoot. We didn’t, and we didn’t need them. Kosovo is not extremely dangerous — it’s not a walk down Main Street, USA, either, for sure — and we do try to depict the dangers and trepidations we faced in the film itself. We did have to worry about leftover land mines, we did have rocks thrown at our car when we crossed the bridge the first time, and we did visit a house that had been shot up by an armed gunman just a few hours before.

I think the people who were really at risk in making the film were our Albanian and Serbian producers. Behar Zogiani, our Albanian producer, is a remarkable man. I think he is an amazing asset to the people of Kosovo. He’s a very compassionate, forward-thinking man whom I consider it an honor to have worked with. After the film was screened in Kosovo, we think Behar may have received death threats from some people who didn’t like the idea that an Albanian would work on a film that tried to be balanced and honest.

Jovica Miljkovic, our Serb producer, is a hero to us as well. He’s a bright, young man who loves his home, his country, and I think was also under a lot of pressure — even working with American filmmakers is met with a lot of suspicion there; after all, Americans are very much "the enemy." The scariest part of the whole process, I guess, was knowing that even listening to the other side — or even working with someone who was listening to the other side — was often met with suspicion and derision.

LB: A lot of people ask us if we felt like we were in danger, but the truth of the matter is that the people who appear in the film were the courageous ones. They’re the ones who may face reprisals or repercussions for talking to us. They’re the ones who are truly brave.

Was there any attempt — from the local government or from the many international agencies — to interfere with your project?

LB: Our main problem came from KFOR (Kosovo Force) troops — the 20,000 or so NATO troops [who are] there to try and keep the peace. Their policy is not to let any media film them, and so there were a number of times when we’d try to get a shot of KFOR troops and they would see us, come over, and make us rewind and erase the tape. Other than that, the international community was very open and supportive. We had UN Press Credentials; the International Committee of the Red Cross was very supportive as well.

I’d also like to point out that the OSCE — Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe — was very supportive. They actually gave us some wonderful feedback on View from the Bridge to help guide us to make sure the film couldn’t be misused by media outlets in Kosovo and Serbia that had their own biased agendas.

Were there any threats or attacks against those involved in the production of View from the Bridge?

JE: We did get a rock thrown at our car the first time we crossed the bridge in Mitrovica. There are a group of Serb radicals, extremists — whatever you want to call them — who hang around the north side of the bridge and basically try to intimidate anyone who tries to cross. We couldn’t drive our car across at the point since it had Kosovo plates — that would be a recipe for a potential big problem — so we walked across and met Jovica, our Serbian producer, on the North side. We got in his car and heard a big ol’ bang as we drove away. Jovica was very upset, it wasn’t a really warm welcome for his friends from the States. But that’s the reality of life in Kosovo. That there are people around who prefer violence and intimidation to reasoned discussion.

LB: Also, as we mentioned earlier, after the film screened in Pristina we think Behar may have been threatened by some Albanian extremists who felt that any portrayal of Kosovo that included an honest look at the Serb viewpoint was unpatriotic and treacherous.

The production notes on the View from the Bridge website state that "Behar Zogiani and Jovica Miljkovic, the Albanian and Serbian producers of the film, never met during principal photography." How could that be?

LB: They didn’t. They only met once, after filming was completed, in the middle of the bridge in Mitrovica, so Behar could give a tape to Jovica. It sounds crazy, and it is, but it’s true. There was a brief, delusional moment near the end of filming where we thought we could have a wrap party and get everyone together for a beer, but it just wasn’t to be.

JE: We tried very hard to find stories of Serbs and Albanians working together in Kosovo, but almost every time we set out to film a story of cooperation, one side or the other would get scared and not show up. There’s definitely an atmosphere of intimidation and fear in Kosovo, that even engaging with the other side is an act of betrayal. It took a lot of courage for many of the people in the film just to appear on camera. We owe them a great debt of gratitude.

What do you expect to accomplish with View from the Bridge?

JE: At the very least we hope the film provokes people to think very critically, about their media, about their politicians, and about their own role in peacemaking, even on the smallest scale. Kosovo had totally fallen off the media radar because it was no longer "breaking news," yet there are still 20,000 troops there. It seems more than a little short-sighted to go to war in Iraq and not critically examine the post-war period where we last intervened. Also, I hope the film makes people think about how profoundly damaging the politics of division — the politics of hate — are. We have a choice, to see ourselves as one people with diverse ideas, or as many peoples each with a single idea. I hope the film makes people think hard about that choice.

LB: Our log line for View from the Bridge is "Peace is for the brave," and I think that really sums up what we hope people get from the film. People associate courage with picking up a gun and killing someone, but it takes just as much — or more — courage to put that gun down and move on, move forward, to recognize and forgive the past and forge something new and better.

View from the Bridge was shot in 2005. Has much changed since then?

JE: We actually shot the film in the summer of 2005. Things have improved a bit there, especially outside of the northern part of Kosovo. There’s a little more freedom of movement for minorities. But the situation in Mitrovica, since it’s the focal point for all the ethnic tension, hasn’t changed that much. Nationalist politicians from Serbia still come to North Mitrovica to hold rallies to help them win elections in Serbia. Politically, things are still at an impasse. There have been years of talks and discussions, but no hint of a compromise. Albanians won’t back away from their insistence on full independence, and Serbs won’t back away from their insistence that Kosovo remain part of Serbia. Right now it looks very much like Kosovo will unilaterally declare independence in the very near future. Everyone’s hoping that there isn’t a new outbreak of violence, but people are definitely on edge.

LB: The situation with the Roma (Gypsies) of Mitrovica is very interesting, and really shows how they are very much stuck in the middle. Many of their homes have now been rebuilt, but very few, if any, have moved back. Not only are they afraid of more violence if they go back, they’re also under pressure from expat Roma who fled abroad — often with amnesty from their host governments. The fear of the Roma expat community that lives outside Kosovo is that if Roma move back to their neighborhood, then Roma who fled elsewhere in Europe will lose their amnesty because they are no longer being "persecuted." It’s a very complicated dynamic.

There are many who claim that movies don’t influence policy and that they can’t change the world. What do you think?

LB: I don’t think that’s true. I’ve spent my whole career making films about people who spoke up and made a difference, whether it be Holocaust survivor turned civil-rights activist Judy Meisel in Tak for Alt or the grassroots Soviet Jewry activists in Refusenik. And I think View from the Bridge is a great example of how even a small independent film can actually influence and change people and policy.

This year, the European Union (EU) is taking over the administration of Kosovo from the UN. The European Union Planning Team for Kosovo (EUPT), the group responsible for planning and implementing the takeover, has made our film a primary part of its training for all staff in its 27 member states. Helping the EU staff understand and constructively engage with the fractious ethnicities in the province — instead of insulating themselves by just going "from their hotel to their office to the bar and back to their hotel" — has been one of the most rewarding chapters of our careers.

We’ve also screened the film for US troops at Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, and helping them understand the province and the people as they try to "keep the peace" has been very fulfilling. One US soldier — rifle in hand — actually told us that we were doing as much for Kosovo with our film as they were with their guns.

So do I think films can make a difference? You bet I do.

Joan Blondell: Q&A with Biographer Matthew Kennedy

Rudolph Valentino: Q&A with Valentino Site Creator Donna Hill

INCORRECT ENTERTAINMENT: Q&A with Author Anthony Slide

THE HOLLYWOOD BOOK OF EXTRAVAGANCE: Q&A with Author James Robert Parish

Anita Page: Q&A with Author Allan Ellenberger

Anita Page: Q&A with Author Allan Ellenberger - Part II

Q&A with NOW PLAYING Author Anthony Slide

Gay Kiss Clips: Q&A with Montage Creator Robert Eldredge

Barbara Payton: Q&A with Biographer John O’Dowd

Joan Crawford: Q&A with Neil Maciejewski

Comments RSS