Is There a Balkan Cinema?: A Filmmakers' and Critics' Symposium Organized by Andrew James Horton with Dan Georgakas and Angelike Contis
The notion of Balkan cinema and whether or not such an entity can be said to exist has been debated in the region in recent years. To address this question, we surveyed a number of directors and critics active in the region. We asked three questions of each respondent and asked him or her to reply in either an essay or question- and-answer format. We asked film directors the following three questions: (1) To what degree can we speak of Balkan cinema as well the cinemas of specific Balkan countries? (2) What is the single most important issue that makes the biggest professional difference in your life as a Balkan filmmaker? (3) What five Balkan films would you select for wide international distribution? We asked film critics the following questions: (1) To what degree can we speak of Balkan cinema? (2) What do you like best about the cinema of this region? And (3) What five Balkan films would you select for wide international distribution? Directors Kujtim Cashku Albania (1) We all know that the story is an important element of cinema. The Balkans is a place of stories and storytelling people. They create stories, events, heroes, conflicts, situations, even when those are missing. The telling of myths and legends, and living as though one were participating in folktale, is characteristic of the Balkans. These traits are reflected in the cinema that is made here. The meaning of past and future, death and life, love and hate meld with mystery and mysticism to become the nucleus of stories. The characters in Balkan stories are an amalgam of the different nations in the region as well. You find the same comical character in slightly different versions in Romania, Turkey, Serbia, Albania, Greece, etc., just as you find the same coffee, which in Greece is considered Greek coffee, and in Turkey, Turkish coffee. A long memory for our history has provoked a permanent state of conflict. This is great for creative people who find in it themes, ideas, and stories that inspire interesting cinema, but not so comfortable for leading a normal life. From the artist's perspective, the Balkans is a gold mine for cinema stories. The Balkans are more of a stage for tragi-comedies than for dramas. Balkan characters are individual heroes or mass heroes like a chorus in ancient Greek theater. The inability to communicate, the prejudices, the nostalgia for past times, creates a feeling of self-victimization in the Balkans. In Balkan stories, victims and aggressors live together. Even when they attempt to build a bridge of mutual understanding, they lose their momentum and fail to communicate. The bridge does not allow them to pass from an old conflict to a new understanding, but allows them to fight each other in the middle over the raging current. (2) I will personalize this answer, because there are some common elements as I mentioned above for Balkan mentalities, but there are also some differences, which are linked with the personal life and experience of each filmmaker. This personal experience makes them very diverse and unique. I had a communist father, a very honest and idealistic communist who was disappointed at the end of his life. My mother was anticommunist and lost half of her family in labor camps and Albanian prisons. She was satisfied at the end of her life with the toppling of the communist regime .The very sad life of my mother, gave me a particularly visual way of understanding the Orwellian concept of "big brother" watching. The combination of living with my father and mother, my studies in and out of Albania, and the change of the system from communism to democracy all play a part in who I am today. I graduated from the Dramatic Art School in Film & TV in Romania and I studied human-rights advocacy at Columbia University in New York. I made some of my movies under the communist regime and I"m continuing to make them now, All of this is reflected in my work. (3) I am more informed about American and European cinema than Balkan cinema. What I know are mainly the movies distributed by international distributors and discussed by international critics. Among those I could recommend are Underground, Before the Rain, No Man's Land, and Eternity and A Day. Nuri Bilge Ceylan Turkey This is a difficult question. I think there is a Balkan sensibility. I feel it. Maybe I cannot express it well, but when you say Balkan, I visualize something, a kind of personality, a kind of soul, a spirit. But I don't think you can talk about Balkan cinema if we are talking about a unique quality, some common thread running through the region. Art is very personal. Instead of geographic togetherness or commonness, there is spiritual kinship. For me, Ozu and Kiarostami are from the same country; much more than say Ozu and Kurosawa. You have that same diversity in the directors from the Balkans. Each of them is different and many ways far away from one another. I think there is an Ottoman footprint in the Balkans, There are still Turkish people living in those areas, in Greece for example. When you see them, you see that we are related. You feel it. You also understand: they come, we go. The food and music and so many cultural things remain, but also travel. It is impossible not to feel this. I have never had trouble financing my films, because they were so low-budget. I could make films with my own money all my life. I like to make chamber music. Small films. So financing has never been an issue for me. But if you are living in a country such as Turkey and you want to be known in the key centers of cinema, you need to go to the festivals, especially the big ones. If you don't launch your films in one of the three biggest—Cannes, Berlin, Venice—it is much more difficult to find an audience beyond your country. If you have the luck to be selected for one of them, things are much easier. If you are working in America, you may not need that. But most filmmakers need the festivals to be known in the film community. You can call that publicity. After the Cannes prize, of course, the world opened for me. But if you want to make films, you can film anywhere in the world, and I think it is easier in a small country. I am very interested in the Romanian cinema right now. I think they have great filmmakers, especially Cristi Puiu. He is one of my favorite contemporary directors. I also know the work of young people working in Romania who I think will have a great impact on the world cinema. When I was on the short film jury at Cannes we gave the prize to two Romanian shorts. The director of one of these was Corneliu Porumboiu. Now he has made 12:08 East of Bucharest. His short was great and now his first fiction film is great. There are young people coming up in Romania who will have a great impact on world cinema. Constantine Giannaris Greece When someone says Balkan cinema, Kusturica comes to mind, the images of the faces from Time of the Gypsies. What also comes to mind is that cliché of the crazy, surreal Yugoslav—the idea that they have this kind of black humor and a dark temperament, as epitomized by Kusturica in films like Underground. That's what comes to my mind when I think of Balkan cinema, because I don't know many of their films. I"ve seen maybe one or two Romanian films. Bulgarian films I hardly know anything about. Even less about Albanian films, except those amazing patriotic war blockbusters made under Hoxha. I"ve seen maybe ten Albanian films since the fall of the communist regime. I caught two Macedonian films and almost nothing from Croatia and I saw some Bosnian films in Sarajevo last year. My Hostage was the opening film, but that was the first time a Greek film had been invited to take part in the competition section at Sarajevo. Sar-A-jevo, Saraj-E-vo. You say that one way or another depending on whether you are a Croat or a Serb or a Bosnian. I don't think Balkan cinema exists except as a geographical identification. I don't know what the films have in common. The divisions amongst them are just as great as anything that unites them. I think it's just a regional thing. We don't know where to put all this stuff, so we just lump it under the rubric of "Balkan." I don't consider myself a Balkan filmmaker. And would you include Turkish film? I mean that's such a distinctive identity. Why, how would you lump all this stuff together? You could say the Balkans is where the nineteenth century died and if you like, the twentieth century was born—and where the twenty-first century was born. But apart from that, I think that, in a sense, it's kind of easy and lazy for curators to say, "Okay, Balkan Cinema. It's trendy and in the news because they are killing each other. That's catchy. It"ll get an audience." If you want to use geographic criteria, Greek filmmakers are just as much Mediterranean filmmakers as they are Balkan filmmakers. Apart from maybe Angelopoulos, we"re not connected in terms of subject matter or temperament. We were never under the rule of the Stalinists. We had our own problems, but we didn"t go through that historical nightmare. Greeks are not really connected to events depicted in post-1990 Balkan films. Okay, there was a horrible war within the borders of the ex-Yugoslavian Republic, but we were really not of that experience. We were not of the experience that Kusturica tries to apply in Underground as a kind of allegory of war and madness. We were not of the experience seen in Powder Keg. Our experience mainly was limited to how we received immigrants, illegal or otherwise, from that conflict. We then divided politically about what we felt about those protagonists. But we were not of that experience. It was secondhand, absolutely second hand. We had that luxury. And that was a huge luxury for Greeks—not to be embroiled in that. I think there is a cinema that has links between France and Africa, especially parts of West Africa, because they have a common linguistic basis that comes from colonialism. Here, the colonial language of the fifteenth century onwards, Turkish, is not really a lingua franca anymore. The nineteenth century sorted that out in a radical and unfortunate way, because it would be quite nice to be able to speak a common language. Those generations, especially in Greece, have died out. You are never talking directly to people who are actually your neighbors. It's not even like the other Europeans that have a joint Latin or Germanic base to their language. You know, a Spaniard can actually talk to a French person because there is a common Latin Romance root. The Spaniards and the Italians can actually understand each other. We cannot understand our neighbors and they cannot understand us. Cyrillic is not Greek and Greek is not Cyrillic. I hate this huge assumption that Russian or Slavic is kind of like Greek. It isn"t. Can you understand Romanized Turkic because it is written in Latin letters? Of course you can"t. That's exactly what it's like for Greeks to try to read Cyrillic script. I was in a festival recently in Italy and there were Albanian directors there and I felt automatically a kind of warmth. It was interesting to talk to them. I felt at ease with them, but we had to talk either through English or Italian. Damjan Kozole Slovenia (1) Sure, there's a lot of things we have in common: hot temperament, black humor, a rather unstable and turbulent political past, lack of money—or, to put it nicely, insufficient funds for film production. However, I don't think there is such thing as "Balkan film" or "Balkan poetics." Balkan cinematography is just a geo-political term, conveniently used to label films which are produced from Slovenia to Turkey, that is, in the Souteast of Europe. (2) Lack of money and because of that, the inability to achieve the necessary continuity of work. For example, it has been three years since I made the film Spare Parts, and I have not been given a chance to make another movie since then. (3) I would like to see international availability of Day and Hours, Idle Running, and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. Dusan Makavajev Serbia/International (1) Strange vitality, conflicting rules, humor, a survival urge, chaotic longings, lack of sense, fatality and general disorientation. In all these categories women with these traits make them seem more positive than their male counterparts. Was the question about films or life? (2) Uncertainty about one's own life, status, family, city, region, nation, and neighbors. (3) Take any five of the following: The Role of My Family in the World Revolution, Before the Rain, The Death of Mr.Lazarescu, Red Horse, When I am Dead and White, Three, Early Works, Celebration, Zle Pare, Lisice, and Who is Singing over There? Milcho Manchevski Macedonia/International (1) I don't think there is such a thing. There are individual films, good films, bad films, films that touch us, films that leave us indifferent, long films, short films. Besides, I am not sure that if someone showed me a film from one of the Balkan countries and I didn"t recognize the language, that I could recognize it as a Balkan film. (2) Being branded "a Balkan filmmaker" as opposed to just a "filmmaker." (3) Unfortunately, I do not know the films coming from the Balkans well enough to make such a list. I can say I appreciate several films: Birch by Ante Babaja, Who's That Singing Over There? by Slobodan Ssijan, and the films of Dusan Makavejev. Corneliu Porumboiu Romania (1) I have to start by saying that I don't have a very large perspective on the Balkan cinema. In a way, I don't know if it exists. What I can say, is that there is one characteristic which can be truly called Balkan, that is a special kind of humor, an absurd humor I"d say. Besides that, I think we can identify an entire series of influences, starting with the Western cinema and ending with Russian film. I don't think we can talk about Balkan cinema in a programmatic way, and neither about a national cinema developed in a certain direction. (2) First of all, the fact that religion is the most important cultural component. And second, the fact that I"m living here! (3) My five would be When Father Was Away on Business, The Reconstruction, The Bee Keeper, Distant, and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. Goran Radovanovic Serbia (1) The Balkans still survives as a single cultural area, only thanks to the prejudice and distorted view of the contemporary Western audience. Do we consider the notion of "Scandinavian film" in the same manner? Is there any sense in discussing similarities and differences between Lars Von Trier and Aki Karausmaki? Given that perspective, I wonder, is it at all possible to compare Emir Kusturica, Pintilliea and Angelopoulos? Or, even more absurdly: Wajda and Werner Herzog? How can such similarities and differences be put within the context of a "Central European" film environment? This is why I believe that Balkan film exists only as category if applied to the ex-Yugoslav cinema, which was based on a fifty-year-long common history of a totalitarian regime. Other "Balkan" cinemas (Romanian, Bulgarian) derive their similarity from the Soviet-type ideological framework. All other "Balkan" similarities are merely prejudices and stereotypes of Western cultural and ideological assumptions. This is also the context in which the Greek cinema is viewed, though it evolved relatively painlessly without a major influence of totalitarian regimes. (2) The issue of my own life and work that can be described as a "constant survival process". (3) My five choices would be I Even Met Some Happy Gypsies, Ulysses" Gaze, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, and Do You Remember Dolly Bell? Pantelis Voulgaris Greece I remember well the days when the Balkan countries belonged to two different political camps. The films that we used to watch were based on a Soviet model of production. Although that was a difficult situation, they were also blessed with film studios that had big government support. For me personally, their particular esthetic, after Italian cinema, made up a big part of my education and fed my need, let's say, to communicate with neighboring countries. Our production always was a little below what I"d see there. In the 1960's, a lot of those films came to Greece. We didn"t learn about cinema in schools but at the Cinema Club [Kinimatografiki Lesxh], organized by Aglaia Metropoulo. Every Sunday we"d go to a cinema in Athens. That's where we came into contact with films from countries that weren"t the U.S. or big European countries. That's where we became directors. Mitropoulo would do a small introduction about the film, we"d watch it, and then a discussion would follow. I still have the programs. They"d tell about the director and the history of the film. Things are much different for today's kids, who have every kind of access to films through the Internet and DVD's. Back then, the Thessalonki festival had just started and only had Greek films. I have the impression that the esthetic of Hungarian films, Czech films, and Bulgarian films influenced Greek directors to a certain degree. I think that Takis Kanellopoulos captured the landscapes of Macedonia with slow pacing, and I believe that this influenced Theodoros Angelopoulos in his first films. It is a cinematic esthetic approach that we absorbed. But if I had to identify the biggest influence on me personally, it would be Italian cinema. I saw social problems in those films that also concerned my country, types of behavior, actor's interpretations, dialog that were relevant to the particularities of a Greek. I"m not referring to one big director in particular. There were many. Fellini, Antonioni, De Sica, Visconti, Petri, and Rosi to name just a few. Any elements that refer to the Balkan region in my films are necessary references due to the types of stories I tell rather than a particular cinematic reference. When I make films I don't think of the region. I can"t say that I know the Balkans very well, even as a guest or a traveler. I haven"t traveled very much. I have gone to festivals where my films have gone, but I don't have many personal or specific reference points. I went to Bulgaria when I made Acropole because I found the theater there in Sofia. I tried to use a cinematographer from there, but we didn"t speak the same language and neither he nor I spoke English. The problems were so great that I brought all the crew, not just the actors, from Greece. For six weeks, we were a bit of Greece in Bulgaria without being marked by the atmosphere of the city. But I discovered that the Bulgarian people are very dignified. I hadn"t known their character previously. By time we were in Sofia to make Acropole, the studios had been destroyed. Only the buildings existed. The cameras had been sold, the costumes. Everything was gone. I believe that a closer relationship with the Balkans must be—needs to be—forged when it comes to the production of films. These countries had a tradition of making more challenging, impressive films than we did, so that means technicians are left behind who know how to work on such productions. Now that I"ve traveled to countries where Brides was played, I was impressed by how the non-Greek audiences, in Australia and the U.S. were steeped in stories like those in Brides. They had similar personal histories. And with other films, that don't have a theme like immigration, when the story is correctly told, with characters analyzed in depth, it's possible to communicate. Of course there are also elements of our everyday life that aren"t easily understood by non-Greeks. For instance, I happened to screen It's A Long Road in Munich with a German producer who was the producer of Wim Wenders's first film. The scene at the provincial nightclub with women from other countries left a strong impression, but he couldn"t understand why the man destroyed the whole club. I"m sure when that story was played in Balkan countries it was much more recognizable than in countries like Germany, because the Balkan countries celebrate like Greeks do, with wine and dance and song, and pathos. Sophia Zornitsa Bulgaria (1) I think we can speak of Balkan cinema because it is different in many ways. Storywise, ours, like our way of life, is different; the method of filmmaking is different too. Competition is between artists and artists" groups rather than between business groups and advertising is not as much of a factor. What people say about the film matters, however, so the films are story-oriented and don't necessarily have "commercial elements" (or, unfortunately, a large public). For me the most interesting, distinguishing mark of the Balkan cinema is a special kind of temperament in both dramas and comedies. The way characters create and solve problems and apologize for doing so. I believe they evoke deeper feelings than the usual blockbusters do. The cinemas of the different Balkan countries have distinguishing marks also: the deep sadness of Turkish films, the humor of Serbian film, and the humanity of the Bosnian films. I like the old Bulgarian films and I feel we are close to discovering the new face of Bulgarian cinema as the Romanians just did. (2)I don't do it for money. Here, it's hard for a director or producer to live on filmmaking unless they do TV or commercials (or steal from the production). Your love for films has to be bigger than your wish for a good standard of living. I tend to believe that it shows in the films. I don't think is the case for all the other Balkan countries. (3) My first choice would be a compilation of five great films by three established authors. From Kusturica I would select A Time of Gypsies, Underground, and Black Cat, White Cat. I would add No Man's Land from Tanovic and Powder Keg from Paskaljevic. From the new generation of directors who have made one or two films, I would recommend Grbavica, Gori vatra, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Volim te, and Mila from Mars. Critics Lorenzo Codelli Italy (1) Let me compare the definition of "Balkan Cinema" to that of "Italian Cinema." A simple geographic concept which has no descriptive meaning to a non-Italian person, it says nothing about the extreme variety of different cultures, languages, historical backgrounds, even races, of my own country—sorry, countries. It is exactly the same for the Balkans. The more I see old or recent movies from Balkan countries, the less I notice common trends, values, cultures, and so on. (2) Its great and still unappreciated heritage. The present, unfortunately, seems rather poor, or quite unpromising, compared to such a fabulous past. Yes, as in the case of Spain, and several other countries once ruled by harsh dictators, democracy doesn"t mean better cinema, just more auteurs. (3) I would start with revolutionaries like Makavejev and Angelopoulos. Then I would explore what came before them. Instead of thinking of films of or by a director, we might want to consider the films of or by studios. As a Spaghetti Western fan, I am dreaming of a DVD collection devoted to all those cheap actioners shot all over the Balkans. Yusuf Guven Editorial Board: Yeni film magazine in Turkey I think there's definitely a cultural link between Balkan countries, but we cannot say Balkan cinema is this or Balkan cinema is that. In different countries, we have different cinemas and even inside the same culture there are different cinemas. Even so, I think that the films of Kusturica were the ideological templates for the Balkan cinema during the time of Yugoslavia. Now that there are already six countries derived from ex-Yugoslavia, Kusturica reminds us of the carnivalesque ways of the Balkan peoples—that mixture of joy and pain that always come as a package in the Balkans. The films always give us something to a laugh about and something to cry over. I think there is a Balkan footprint in Turkey just as there is an Ottoman footprint in the Balkans. Once we go beyond the political arrangements, people are thinking and acting in a similar fashion. During the Ottoman time, some of the most powerful people near the Sultan were from other Balkan countries. Before the Ottomans, it was the same. So before the Ottomans, during the Ottomans, and after the Ottomans, people of different religions lived together. There are many commonalities, but because of borders, as Angelopoulos has shown deeply in so many of his films, people are separated. People are left stranded on different sides of the same river. I think there is no problem for Turkish cinema to reach outside its borders. This is due to globalization. It is relatively simple to reach the festivals and to be in contact with cinema people. Making films is not a problem either. The difficulty is in distributing the films to a mass audience, both inside our country as well as abroad. We have the same problem with our art films as other nations do: a Turkish film may be available in Paris and London but not in a small city at home. Of all the current Balkan cinemas, I think that of Romania is the most distinctive. For those not familiar with it, I would recommend The Death of Mister Lazarescu. From Turkey, I would recommend the films of Ceylan. Distant has won the awards, but I prefer Clouds of May, which is full of humor and very sincere. Something from Yugoslavia is essential. Perhaps The Time of the Gypsies for the reason I mentioned before about Kusturica's films being a kind of template. And, of course, Angelopoulos. In his later films, he is not just looking at Greece but the whole world of the Balkans. Ulysses" Gaze is particularly good in that respect. Of course there are many other films of great merit, but these are some lodestones for someone who wants to get a sense of the region. Ronald Holloway Editor: Kino (1) This question was raised at the Sarajevo Film Festival during a panel discussion on which productions could be listed as authentic "Balkan" entries in the Regional Competition. It was generally agreed that only the producer and/or director could determine whether or not the production in question qualified as "Balkan." Thus, even Turkey, with an official population of less than five percent on the European side, could enter the competition. Similarly, Slovenia and Hungary could be listed as "Balkan," instead of "CentEast" (East-Central European), to qualify for the competition. Sometimes, democratic voices in Greece shy away from any connotation of "Balkan" on the grounds of being a charter member of the European Union. Thus, one has to be careful in speaking of a specific "Balkan" film production when its content or theme ranges too far from the social, political, and cultural experience of the region. (2) What I like best are Balkan feature films and documentaries that deal pointedly with the political issues of the day, as difficult as these themes may be for the home public. More often than not, however, these films will find their critical echo in international film festivals. It doesn"t surprise me at all that Balkan productions continue to be awarded major international festival prizes. (3) I"d select Before the Rain, Ulysses's Gaze, Powder Keg, No Man's Land, and Kukumi. Dimitris Kerkinos Director of Balkan Film Survey: Thessaloniki Film Festival (1) Following the example of New Latin American Cinema, in emphasizing similarities rather than differences, we can definitely speak of a Balkan cinema, considering the thematic and stylistic motifs that appear in the films of the region. Although the Balkan peoples have the tendency to think of themselves in opposition to their geographic or ethnic neighbors, and to consider aspects of the regional cultural heritage as exclusively theirs, it is this need for diversification that unites them. This tendency becomes the connecting link of Balkan cinema, and, at the same time, reveals common traits such as a shared turbulent history and politics, the marginalized identity of the region, the current transitory state of affairs, and their rebellious mentality. (2) I like the efforts to deal with the recent war in Yugoslavia, but also with past political issues as a means to find ways to overcome the problems of the past. This goes a long way to understanding the complexity of Balkan history and contemporary social reality. I greatly admire the creative power of Balkan directors, who produce important films despite political and economic adversity. Their stylistic and thematic diversity, the poetry of their images, the lively depiction of traditional life, the magic realism, the humanistic representation of ethnic groups such as the Gypsies, and their subversive sense of humor fascinate me. (3) I would pick The Death of Mr. Lazrescu for its organic embodiment of real time, the intermingling of documentary with fiction, and the suspense created for a story whose end is known from the beginning. I would choose Distant for Ceylan's existential treatment of the theme of urban immigration, the photographic mastery, and the way the esthetics contribute to the development of the story. I would recommend Pretty Village, Pretty Flame for its effort to soberly present the complexity of the civil war experience by avoiding mythologizing the views of the director's country's and finding fault on both sides. The Time of the Gypsies qualifies for sheer overall artistic achievement; poetic imagery, a baroque atmosphere, the juxtaposition of conventional realism with magic realism and the humanistic depiction of love for an ethnic minority. My fifth pick, The Four Seasons of the Law by Dimos Avedeliotis, is not as well known internationally as some of the others. I admire its poetic and impressionistic cinematography, its depiction of the celebratory character of life, its effort to penetrate the essence of Greek reality, and the director's attempt to make an authentic cinema without imitating contemporary, foreign, commercial trends. Deborah Young Rome-based writer for Variety and Cineaste How can we define Balkan cinema? The distinctions we make between any group of films, whether we label them "Slovenian" or "Greek" or "Macedonian" or, more generally, "Balkan," usually boil down to cultural and linguistic differences. Since the fall of the Soviet bloc and the breakup of Yugoslavia, cultures and languages in the area have become more stubbornly separatist than ever. Serbo-Croatian is now two languages for instance, while political tensions and new borders have restricted the free flow of actors and technicians. Whereas it was once quite a trick for non-Yugoslavs to tell the difference between films made in the various regions, it is now virtually impossible not to say, "This is a story about Serbia today" or "This takes place in postwar Bosnia." Indeed, the films aren"t comprehensible without this contextualization. Still, critics sometimes find it useful to look at the bigger picture, so why not try to find a common denominator for the films being made in Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and the former Yugoslavia? The Sarajevo Film Festival, which shuns the word "Balkan," specializes in showing films from what it calls "the region" and this has proved a pretty good working formula. On a practical level, at least, the filmmakers live within driving distance and visiting programmers feel they"re getting their money's worth by seeing all the new films made in the "region." This leaves unanswered the question of what really links these films, since their languages and cultures are quite different. In the end, I would say geography bleeds into history. It is their tragic history that unites the Balkan countries in my mind, their political divisions and redivisions, the politically maneuvered blood feuds breeding endless violence and, on the other hand, the Balkan people's astonishing resiliency, their ability to survive ceaseless turmoil, to intermarry, intermingle, and laugh at themselves. It's as though there was a collective lesson here about the nonnegotiable nature of tolerance amid diversity. These are the themes that fascinate me most in watching their films. Looking for five exceptional films for DVD release, I would rely on relatively recent work from former Yugoslavia to tell the tale with passion and intelligence. Milcho Manchevsky well describes the mysteriously circular nature of Balkan conflicts in Before the Rain, a three-parter set in Macedonia and London. Capturing the horror of war itself, Ademir Kenovic's The Perfect Circle takes us to Sarajevo under siege, while Zivojin Pavlovic's haunting film about the destruction of Vukovar focuses on the difficult moral choices facing Yugoslav military officers sent to raze the Croatian city. The sickening violence that lurks beneath the surface of nationalism leaps from the screen in Goran Paskaljevic's The Powder Keg (also exhibited as Balkan Cabaret), whose splintered narrative reflects the schizoid mind of an entire nation. (The other two films in his Serbian trilogy, A Midwinter Night's Dream and The Optimists well deserve to be presented in a three-disc set.) I would balance all this gloom, however, against the remarkable capacity for humor and healing evident in Bosnian cinema. What more upbeat affirmation can we find than Pjer Zalica's delightful, delicate Days and Hours? Using joshing humor to describe the close ties of a Muslim family in Sarajevo, it exposes the emotional wounds left by the war and brings them to a cathartic ending that heals the entire community. Cineaste, Vol. 32 No.3 (Summer 2007), on-line only.

Is There a Balkan Cinema?: A Filmmakers' and Critics' Symposium

Organized by Andrew James Horton with Dan Georgakas and Angelike Contis

The notion of Balkan cinema and whether or not such an entity can be said to exist has been debated in the region in recent years. To address this question, we surveyed a number of directors and critics active in the region. We asked three questions of each respondent and asked him or her to reply in either an essay or question- and-answer format.

We asked film directors the following three questions: (1) To what degree can we speak of Balkan cinema as well the cinemas of specific Balkan countries? (2) What is the single most important issue that makes the biggest professional difference in your life as a Balkan filmmaker? (3) What five Balkan films would you select for wide international distribution?

We asked film critics the following questions: (1) To what degree can we speak of Balkan cinema? (2) What do you like best about the cinema of this region? And (3) What five Balkan films would you select for wide international distribution?

Directors

Kujtim Cashku

Albania

(1) We all know that the story is an important element of cinema. The Balkans is a place of stories and storytelling people. They create stories, events, heroes, conflicts, situations, even when those are missing. The telling of myths and legends, and living as though one were participating in folktale, is characteristic of the Balkans. These traits are reflected in the cinema that is made here.

The meaning of past and future, death and life, love and hate meld with mystery and mysticism to become the nucleus of stories. The characters in Balkan stories are an amalgam of the different nations in the region as well. You find the same comical character in slightly different versions in Romania, Turkey, Serbia, Albania, Greece, etc., just as you find the same coffee, which in Greece is considered Greek coffee, and in Turkey, Turkish coffee. A long memory for our history has provoked a permanent state of conflict. This is great for creative people who find in it themes, ideas, and stories that inspire interesting cinema, but not so comfortable for leading a normal life. From the artist's perspective, the Balkans is a gold mine for cinema stories.

The Balkans are more of a stage for tragi-comedies than for dramas. Balkan characters are individual heroes or mass heroes like a chorus in ancient Greek theater. The inability to communicate, the prejudices, the nostalgia for past times, creates a feeling of self-victimization in the Balkans. In Balkan stories, victims and aggressors live together. Even when they attempt to build a bridge of mutual understanding, they lose their momentum and fail to communicate. The bridge does not allow them to pass from an old conflict to a new understanding, but allows them to fight each other in the middle over the raging current.

(2) I will personalize this answer, because there are some common elements as I mentioned above for Balkan mentalities, but there are also some differences, which are linked with the personal life and experience of each filmmaker. This personal experience makes them very diverse and unique.

I had a communist father, a very honest and idealistic communist who was disappointed at the end of his life. My mother was anticommunist and lost half of her family in labor camps and Albanian prisons. She was satisfied at the end of her life with the toppling of the communist regime .The very sad life of my mother, gave me a particularly visual way of understanding the Orwellian concept of "big brother" watching. The combination of living with my father and mother, my studies in and out of Albania, and the change of the system from communism to democracy all play a part in who I am today. I graduated from the Dramatic Art School in Film & TV in Romania and I studied human-rights advocacy at Columbia University in New York. I made some of my movies under the communist regime and I"m continuing to make them now, All of this is reflected in my work.

(3) I am more informed about American and European cinema than Balkan cinema. What I know are mainly the movies distributed by international distributors and discussed by international critics. Among those I could recommend are Underground, Before the Rain, No Man's Land, and Eternity and A Day.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Turkey

This is a difficult question. I think there is a Balkan sensibility. I feel it. Maybe I cannot express it well, but when you say Balkan, I visualize something, a kind of personality, a kind of soul, a spirit. But I don't think you can talk about Balkan cinema if we are talking about a unique quality, some common thread running through the region. Art is very personal. Instead of geographic togetherness or commonness, there is spiritual kinship. For me, Ozu and Kiarostami are from the same country; much more than say Ozu and Kurosawa. You have that same diversity in the directors from the Balkans. Each of them is different and many ways far away from one another. I think there is an Ottoman footprint in the Balkans, There are still Turkish people living in those areas, in Greece for example. When you see them, you see that we are related. You feel it. You also understand: they come, we go. The food and music and so many cultural things remain, but also travel. It is impossible not to feel this.

I have never had trouble financing my films, because they were so low-budget. I could make films with my own money all my life. I like to make chamber music. Small films. So financing has never been an issue for me. But if you are living in a country such as Turkey and you want to be known in the key centers of cinema, you need to go to the festivals, especially the big ones. If you don't launch your films in one of the three biggest—Cannes, Berlin, Venice—it is much more difficult to find an audience beyond your country. If you have the luck to be selected for one of them, things are much easier. If you are working in America, you may not need that. But most filmmakers need the festivals to be known in the film community. You can call that publicity. After the Cannes prize, of course, the world opened for me. But if you want to make films, you can film anywhere in the world, and I think it is easier in a small country.

I am very interested in the Romanian cinema right now. I think they have great filmmakers, especially Cristi Puiu. He is one of my favorite contemporary directors. I also know the work of young people working in Romania who I think will have a great impact on the world cinema. When I was on the short film jury at Cannes we gave the prize to two Romanian shorts. The director of one of these was Corneliu Porumboiu. Now he has made 12:08 East of Bucharest. His short was great and now his first fiction film is great. There are young people coming up in Romania who will have a great impact on world cinema.

Constantine Giannaris

Greece

When someone says Balkan cinema, Kusturica comes to mind, the images of the faces from Time of the Gypsies. What also comes to mind is that cliché of the crazy, surreal Yugoslav—the idea that they have this kind of black humor and a dark temperament, as epitomized by Kusturica in films like Underground. That's what comes to my mind when I think of Balkan cinema, because I don't know many of their films. I"ve seen maybe one or two Romanian films. Bulgarian films I hardly know anything about. Even less about Albanian films, except those amazing patriotic war blockbusters made under Hoxha. I"ve seen maybe ten Albanian films since the fall of the communist regime. I caught two Macedonian films and almost nothing from Croatia and I saw some Bosnian films in Sarajevo last year. My Hostage was the opening film, but that was the first time a Greek film had been invited to take part in the competition section at Sarajevo. Sar-A-jevo, Saraj-E-vo. You say that one way or another depending on whether you are a Croat or a Serb or a Bosnian.

I don't think Balkan cinema exists except as a geographical identification. I don't know what the films have in common. The divisions amongst them are just as great as anything that unites them. I think it's just a regional thing. We don't know where to put all this stuff, so we just lump it under the rubric of "Balkan." I don't consider myself a Balkan filmmaker. And would you include Turkish film? I mean that's such a distinctive identity. Why, how would you lump all this stuff together? You could say the Balkans is where the nineteenth century died and if you like, the twentieth century was born—and where the twenty-first century was born. But apart from that, I think that, in a sense, it's kind of easy and lazy for curators to say, "Okay, Balkan Cinema. It's trendy and in the news because they are killing each other. That's catchy. It"ll get an audience."

If you want to use geographic criteria, Greek filmmakers are just as much Mediterranean filmmakers as they are Balkan filmmakers. Apart from maybe Angelopoulos, we"re not connected in terms of subject matter or temperament. We were never under the rule of the Stalinists. We had our own problems, but we didn"t go through that historical nightmare. Greeks are not really connected to events depicted in post-1990 Balkan films. Okay, there was a horrible war within the borders of the ex-Yugoslavian Republic, but we were really not of that experience. We were not of the experience that Kusturica tries to apply in Underground as a kind of allegory of war and madness. We were not of the experience seen in Powder Keg. Our experience mainly was limited to how we received immigrants, illegal or otherwise, from that conflict. We then divided politically about what we felt about those protagonists. But we were not of that experience. It was secondhand, absolutely second hand. We had that luxury. And that was a huge luxury for Greeks—not to be embroiled in that.

I think there is a cinema that has links between France and Africa, especially parts of West Africa, because they have a common linguistic basis that comes from colonialism. Here, the colonial language of the fifteenth century onwards, Turkish, is not really a lingua franca anymore. The nineteenth century sorted that out in a radical and unfortunate way, because it would be quite nice to be able to speak a common language. Those generations, especially in Greece, have died out. You are never talking directly to people who are actually your neighbors. It's not even like the other Europeans that have a joint Latin or Germanic base to their language. You know, a Spaniard can actually talk to a French person because there is a common Latin Romance root. The Spaniards and the Italians can actually understand each other. We cannot understand our neighbors and they cannot understand us. Cyrillic is not Greek and Greek is not Cyrillic. I hate this huge assumption that Russian or Slavic is kind of like Greek. It isn"t. Can you understand Romanized Turkic because it is written in Latin letters? Of course you can"t. That's exactly what it's like for Greeks to try to read Cyrillic script. I was in a festival recently in Italy and there were Albanian directors there and I felt automatically a kind of warmth. It was interesting to talk to them. I felt at ease with them, but we had to talk either through English or Italian.

Damjan Kozole

Slovenia

(1) Sure, there's a lot of things we have in common: hot temperament, black humor, a rather unstable and turbulent political past, lack of money—or, to put it nicely, insufficient funds for film production. However, I don't think there is such thing as "Balkan film" or "Balkan poetics." Balkan cinematography is just a geo-political term, conveniently used to label films which are produced from Slovenia to Turkey, that is, in the Souteast of Europe.

(2) Lack of money and because of that, the inability to achieve the necessary continuity of work. For example, it has been three years since I made the film Spare Parts, and I have not been given a chance to make another movie since then.

(3) I would like to see international availability of Day and Hours, Idle Running, and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.

Dusan Makavajev

Serbia/International

(1) Strange vitality, conflicting rules, humor, a survival urge, chaotic longings, lack of sense, fatality and general disorientation. In all these categories women with these traits make them seem more positive than their male counterparts. Was the question about films or life?

(2) Uncertainty about one's own life, status, family, city, region, nation, and neighbors.

(3) Take any five of the following: The Role of My Family in the World Revolution, Before the Rain, The Death of Mr.Lazarescu, Red Horse, When I am Dead and White, Three, Early Works, Celebration, Zle Pare, Lisice, and Who is Singing over There?

Milcho Manchevski

Macedonia/International

(1) I don't think there is such a thing. There are individual films, good films, bad films, films that touch us, films that leave us indifferent, long films, short films. Besides, I am not sure that if someone showed me a film from one of the Balkan countries and I didn"t recognize the language, that I could recognize it as a Balkan film.

(2) Being branded "a Balkan filmmaker" as opposed to just a "filmmaker."

(3) Unfortunately, I do not know the films coming from the Balkans well enough to make such a list. I can say I appreciate several films: Birch by Ante Babaja, Who's That Singing Over There? by Slobodan Ssijan, and the films of Dusan Makavejev.

Corneliu Porumboiu

Romania

(1) I have to start by saying that I don't have a very large perspective on the Balkan cinema. In a way, I don't know if it exists. What I can say, is that there is one characteristic which can be truly called Balkan, that is a special kind of humor, an absurd humor I"d say. Besides that, I think we can identify an entire series of influences, starting with the Western cinema and ending with Russian film. I don't think we can talk about Balkan cinema in a programmatic way, and neither about a national cinema developed in a certain direction.

(2) First of all, the fact that religion is the most important cultural component. And second, the fact that I"m living here!

(3) My five would be When Father Was Away on Business, The Reconstruction, The Bee Keeper, Distant, and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.

Goran Radovanovic

Serbia

(1) The Balkans still survives as a single cultural area, only thanks to the prejudice and distorted view of the contemporary Western audience. Do we consider the notion of "Scandinavian film" in the same manner? Is there any sense in discussing similarities and differences between Lars Von Trier and Aki Karausmaki? Given that perspective, I wonder, is it at all possible to compare Emir Kusturica, Pintilliea and Angelopoulos? Or, even more absurdly: Wajda and Werner Herzog? How can such similarities and differences be put within the context of a "Central European" film environment?

This is why I believe that Balkan film exists only as category if applied to the ex-Yugoslav cinema, which was based on a fifty-year-long common history of a totalitarian regime. Other "Balkan" cinemas (Romanian, Bulgarian) derive their similarity from the Soviet-type ideological framework. All other "Balkan" similarities are merely prejudices and stereotypes of Western cultural and ideological assumptions. This is also the context in which the Greek cinema is viewed, though it evolved relatively painlessly without a major influence of totalitarian regimes.

(2) The issue of my own life and work that can be described as a "constant survival process".

(3) My five choices would be I Even Met Some Happy Gypsies, Ulysses" Gaze, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, and Do You Remember Dolly Bell?

Pantelis Voulgaris

Greece

I remember well the days when the Balkan countries belonged to two different political camps. The films that we used to watch were based on a Soviet model of production. Although that was a difficult situation, they were also blessed with film studios that had big government support. For me personally, their particular esthetic, after Italian cinema, made up a big part of my education and fed my need, let's say, to communicate with neighboring countries. Our production always was a little below what I"d see there.

In the 1960's, a lot of those films came to Greece. We didn"t learn about cinema in schools but at the Cinema Club [Kinimatografiki Lesxh], organized by Aglaia Metropoulo. Every Sunday we"d go to a cinema in Athens. That's where we came into contact with films from countries that weren"t the U.S. or big European countries. That's where we became directors. Mitropoulo would do a small introduction about the film, we"d watch it, and then a discussion would follow. I still have the programs. They"d tell about the director and the history of the film. Things are much different for today's kids, who have every kind of access to films through the Internet and DVD's. Back then, the Thessalonki festival had just started and only had Greek films.

I have the impression that the esthetic of Hungarian films, Czech films, and Bulgarian films influenced Greek directors to a certain degree. I think that Takis Kanellopoulos captured the landscapes of Macedonia with slow pacing, and I believe that this influenced Theodoros Angelopoulos in his first films. It is a cinematic esthetic approach that we absorbed. But if I had to identify the biggest influence on me personally, it would be Italian cinema. I saw social problems in those films that also concerned my country, types of behavior, actor's interpretations, dialog that were relevant to the particularities of a Greek. I"m not referring to one big director in particular. There were many. Fellini, Antonioni, De Sica, Visconti, Petri, and Rosi to name just a few. Any elements that refer to the Balkan region in my films are necessary references due to the types of stories I tell rather than a particular cinematic reference.

When I make films I don't think of the region. I can"t say that I know the Balkans very well, even as a guest or a traveler. I haven"t traveled very much. I have gone to festivals where my films have gone, but I don't have many personal or specific reference points. I went to Bulgaria when I made Acropole because I found the theater there in Sofia. I tried to use a cinematographer from there, but we didn"t speak the same language and neither he nor I spoke English. The problems were so great that I brought all the crew, not just the actors, from Greece. For six weeks, we were a bit of Greece in Bulgaria without being marked by the atmosphere of the city. But I discovered that the Bulgarian people are very dignified. I hadn"t known their character previously. By time we were in Sofia to make Acropole, the studios had been destroyed. Only the buildings existed. The cameras had been sold, the costumes. Everything was gone. I believe that a closer relationship with the Balkans must be—needs to be—forged when it comes to the production of films. These countries had a tradition of making more challenging, impressive films than we did, so that means technicians are left behind who know how to work on such productions.

Now that I"ve traveled to countries where Brides was played, I was impressed by how the non-Greek audiences, in Australia and the U.S. were steeped in stories like those in Brides. They had similar personal histories. And with other films, that don't have a theme like immigration, when the story is correctly told, with characters analyzed in depth, it's possible to communicate. Of course there are also elements of our everyday life that aren"t easily understood by non-Greeks. For instance, I happened to screen It's A Long Road in Munich with a German producer who was the producer of Wim Wenders's first film. The scene at the provincial nightclub with women from other countries left a strong impression, but he couldn"t understand why the man destroyed the whole club. I"m sure when that story was played in Balkan countries it was much more recognizable than in countries like Germany, because the Balkan countries celebrate like Greeks do, with wine and dance and song, and pathos.

Sophia Zornitsa

Bulgaria

(1) I think we can speak of Balkan cinema because it is different in many ways. Storywise, ours, like our way of life, is different; the method of filmmaking is different too. Competition is between artists and artists" groups rather than between business groups and advertising is not as much of a factor. What people say about the film matters, however, so the films are story-oriented and don't necessarily have "commercial elements" (or, unfortunately, a large public). For me the most interesting, distinguishing mark of the Balkan cinema is a special kind of temperament in both dramas and comedies. The way characters create and solve problems and apologize for doing so. I believe they evoke deeper feelings than the usual blockbusters do. The cinemas of the different Balkan countries have distinguishing marks also: the deep sadness of Turkish films, the humor of Serbian film, and the humanity of the Bosnian films. I like the old Bulgarian films and I feel we are close to discovering the new face of Bulgarian cinema as the Romanians just did.

(2)I don't do it for money. Here, it's hard for a director or producer to live on filmmaking unless they do TV or commercials (or steal from the production). Your love for films has to be bigger than your wish for a good standard of living. I tend to believe that it shows in the films. I don't think is the case for all the other Balkan countries.

(3) My first choice would be a compilation of five great films by three established authors. From Kusturica I would select A Time of Gypsies, Underground, and Black Cat, White Cat. I would add No Man's Land from Tanovic and Powder Keg from Paskaljevic. From the new generation of directors who have made one or two films, I would recommend Grbavica, Gori vatra, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Volim te, and Mila from Mars.

Critics

Lorenzo Codelli

Italy

(1) Let me compare the definition of "Balkan Cinema" to that of "Italian Cinema." A simple geographic concept which has no descriptive meaning to a non-Italian person, it says nothing about the extreme variety of different cultures, languages, historical backgrounds, even races, of my own country—sorry, countries. It is exactly the same for the Balkans. The more I see old or recent movies from Balkan countries, the less I notice common trends, values, cultures, and so on.

(2) Its great and still unappreciated heritage. The present, unfortunately, seems rather poor, or quite unpromising, compared to such a fabulous past. Yes, as in the case of Spain, and several other countries once ruled by harsh dictators, democracy doesn"t mean better cinema, just more auteurs.

(3) I would start with revolutionaries like Makavejev and Angelopoulos. Then I would explore what came before them. Instead of thinking of films of or by a director, we might want to consider the films of or by studios. As a Spaghetti Western fan, I am dreaming of a DVD collection devoted to all those cheap actioners shot all over the Balkans.

Yusuf Guven

Editorial Board: Yeni film magazine in Turkey

I think there's definitely a cultural link between Balkan countries, but we cannot say Balkan cinema is this or Balkan cinema is that. In different countries, we have different cinemas and even inside the same culture there are different cinemas. Even so, I think that the films of Kusturica were the ideological templates for the Balkan cinema during the time of Yugoslavia. Now that there are already six countries derived from ex-Yugoslavia, Kusturica reminds us of the carnivalesque ways of the Balkan peoples—that mixture of joy and pain that always come as a package in the Balkans. The films always give us something to a laugh about and something to cry over.

I think there is a Balkan footprint in Turkey just as there is an Ottoman footprint in the Balkans. Once we go beyond the political arrangements, people are thinking and acting in a similar fashion. During the Ottoman time, some of the most powerful people near the Sultan were from other Balkan countries. Before the Ottomans, it was the same. So before the Ottomans, during the Ottomans, and after the Ottomans, people of different religions lived together. There are many commonalities, but because of borders, as Angelopoulos has shown deeply in so many of his films, people are separated. People are left stranded on different sides of the same river.

I think there is no problem for Turkish cinema to reach outside its borders. This is due to globalization. It is relatively simple to reach the festivals and to be in contact with cinema people. Making films is not a problem either. The difficulty is in distributing the films to a mass audience, both inside our country as well as abroad. We have the same problem with our art films as other nations do: a Turkish film may be available in Paris and London but not in a small city at home.

Of all the current Balkan cinemas, I think that of Romania is the most distinctive. For those not familiar with it, I would recommend The Death of Mister Lazarescu. From Turkey, I would recommend the films of Ceylan. Distant has won the awards, but I prefer Clouds of May, which is full of humor and very sincere. Something from Yugoslavia is essential. Perhaps The Time of the Gypsies for the reason I mentioned before about Kusturica's films being a kind of template. And, of course, Angelopoulos. In his later films, he is not just looking at Greece but the whole world of the Balkans. Ulysses" Gaze is particularly good in that respect. Of course there are many other films of great merit, but these are some lodestones for someone who wants to get a sense of the region.

Ronald Holloway

Editor: Kino

(1) This question was raised at the Sarajevo Film Festival during a panel discussion on which productions could be listed as authentic "Balkan" entries in the Regional Competition. It was generally agreed that only the producer and/or director could determine whether or not the production in question qualified as "Balkan." Thus, even Turkey, with an official population of less than five percent on the European side, could enter the competition. Similarly, Slovenia and Hungary could be listed as "Balkan," instead of "CentEast" (East-Central European), to qualify for the competition. Sometimes, democratic voices in Greece shy away from any connotation of "Balkan" on the grounds of being a charter member of the European Union. Thus, one has to be careful in speaking of a specific "Balkan" film production when its content or theme ranges too far from the social, political, and cultural experience of the region.

(2) What I like best are Balkan feature films and documentaries that deal pointedly with the political issues of the day, as difficult as these themes may be for the home public. More often than not, however, these films will find their critical echo in international film festivals. It doesn"t surprise me at all that Balkan productions continue to be awarded major international festival prizes.

(3) I"d select Before the Rain, Ulysses's Gaze, Powder Keg, No Man's Land, and Kukumi.

Dimitris Kerkinos

Director of Balkan Film Survey: Thessaloniki Film Festival

(1) Following the example of New Latin American Cinema, in emphasizing similarities rather than differences, we can definitely speak of a Balkan cinema, considering the thematic and stylistic motifs that appear in the films of the region. Although the Balkan peoples have the tendency to think of themselves in opposition to their geographic or ethnic neighbors, and to consider aspects of the regional cultural heritage as exclusively theirs, it is this need for diversification that unites them. This tendency becomes the connecting link of Balkan cinema, and, at the same time, reveals common traits such as a shared turbulent history and politics, the marginalized identity of the region, the current transitory state of affairs, and their rebellious mentality.

(2) I like the efforts to deal with the recent war in Yugoslavia, but also with past political issues as a means to find ways to overcome the problems of the past. This goes a long way to understanding the complexity of Balkan history and contemporary social reality. I greatly admire the creative power of Balkan directors, who produce important films despite political and economic adversity. Their stylistic and thematic diversity, the poetry of their images, the lively depiction of traditional life, the magic realism, the humanistic representation of ethnic groups such as the Gypsies, and their subversive sense of humor fascinate me.

(3) I would pick The Death of Mr. Lazrescu for its organic embodiment of real time, the intermingling of documentary with fiction, and the suspense created for a story whose end is known from the beginning. I would choose Distant for Ceylan's existential treatment of the theme of urban immigration, the photographic mastery, and the way the esthetics contribute to the development of the story. I would recommend Pretty Village, Pretty Flame for its effort to soberly present the complexity of the civil war experience by avoiding mythologizing the views of the director's country's and finding fault on both sides. The Time of the Gypsies qualifies for sheer overall artistic achievement; poetic imagery, a baroque atmosphere, the juxtaposition of conventional realism with magic realism and the humanistic depiction of love for an ethnic minority. My fifth pick, The Four Seasons of the Law by Dimos Avedeliotis, is not as well known internationally as some of the others. I admire its poetic and impressionistic cinematography, its depiction of the celebratory character of life, its effort to penetrate the essence of Greek reality, and the director's attempt to make an authentic cinema without imitating contemporary, foreign, commercial trends.

Deborah Young

Rome-based writer for Variety and Cineaste

How can we define Balkan cinema? The distinctions we make between any group of films, whether we label them "Slovenian" or "Greek" or "Macedonian" or, more generally, "Balkan," usually boil down to cultural and linguistic differences. Since the fall of the Soviet bloc and the breakup of Yugoslavia, cultures and languages in the area have become more stubbornly separatist than ever. Serbo-Croatian is now two languages for instance, while political tensions and new borders have restricted the free flow of actors and technicians. Whereas it was once quite a trick for non-Yugoslavs to tell the difference between films made in the various regions, it is now virtually impossible not to say, "This is a story about Serbia today" or "This takes place in postwar Bosnia." Indeed, the films aren"t comprehensible without this contextualization.

Still, critics sometimes find it useful to look at the bigger picture, so why not try to find a common denominator for the films being made in Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and the former Yugoslavia? The Sarajevo Film Festival, which shuns the word "Balkan," specializes in showing films from what it calls "the region" and this has proved a pretty good working formula. On a practical level, at least, the filmmakers live within driving distance and visiting programmers feel they"re getting their money's worth by seeing all the new films made in the "region." This leaves unanswered the question of what really links these films, since their languages and cultures are quite different. In the end, I would say geography bleeds into history. It is their tragic history that unites the Balkan countries in my mind, their political divisions and redivisions, the politically maneuvered blood feuds breeding endless violence and, on the other hand, the Balkan people's astonishing resiliency, their ability to survive ceaseless turmoil, to intermarry, intermingle, and laugh at themselves. It's as though there was a collective lesson here about the nonnegotiable nature of tolerance amid diversity. These are the themes that fascinate me most in watching their films.

Looking for five exceptional films for DVD release, I would rely on relatively recent work from former Yugoslavia to tell the tale with passion and intelligence. Milcho Manchevsky well describes the mysteriously circular nature of Balkan conflicts in Before the Rain, a three-parter set in Macedonia and London. Capturing the horror of war itself, Ademir Kenovic's The Perfect Circle takes us to Sarajevo under siege, while Zivojin Pavlovic's haunting film about the destruction of Vukovar focuses on the difficult moral choices facing Yugoslav military officers sent to raze the Croatian city. The sickening violence that lurks beneath the surface of nationalism leaps from the screen in Goran Paskaljevic's The Powder Keg (also exhibited as Balkan Cabaret), whose splintered narrative reflects the schizoid mind of an entire nation. (The other two films in his Serbian trilogy, A Midwinter Night's Dream and The Optimists well deserve to be presented in a three-disc set.) I would balance all this gloom, however, against the remarkable capacity for humor and healing evident in Bosnian cinema. What more upbeat affirmation can we find than Pjer Zalica's delightful, delicate Days and Hours? Using joshing humor to describe the close ties of a Muslim family in Sarajevo, it exposes the emotional wounds left by the war and brings them to a cathartic ending that heals the entire community.

Cineaste, Vol. 32 No.3 (Summer 2007), on-line only.