Mon, Jan 21st 7pm
Thurs, Jan 24th 12:30pm
View from the Bridge - the first documentary feature about post-war Kosovo. Sometimes hopeful, sometimes tragic, the struggle to make peace in Kosovo opens a profound window into the human cost of the politics of hate, and reminds us that the ultimate responsibility for peace lies within us all.
Where were you and how did you react when you were told you'd been accepted to Slamdance? Laura was a kilometer from the Gaza strip, shooting her new documentary about Israeli musicians who continue to make music (even rehearsing in bomb shelters) while under daily attack from homemade rockets fired by Palestinian militants in Gaza. John was in the decidedly more comfortable position of shooting tabletop food shots in Bermuda.
Getting into Slamdance was exactly what we needed, and we were thrilled to get in. Though Sundance is great, it's kind of like a really expensive dinner by a famous chef; Slamdance is more like the best comfort food ever from a roadside diner. For a film like ours, which was basically made on our own dime with an amazingly devoted team of filmmakers, getting recognition from a festival like Slamdance somehow seemed perfectly right. We're very grateful for the chance to screen here.
When did the two of you begin collaborating on the project?Laura started working on the project after she met a UN aid worker named Diane Brown who told her about the situation in Kosovo. Production was originally slated for spring of 2002 (without co-director John Ealer), but just before the crew left there was a wave of ethnic riots in Kosovo, and they could no longer gain entrance to the country. With the project on hold, Laura embarked on another huge project, a retrospective film about the Soviet Jewry movement called "Refusenik" (which premiered in December 2007 at the Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival.) When John, who worked as a cinematographer on Refusenik, heard about the idled Kosovo project, he was intrigued. In 2003, he re-wrote the treatment for the project, focusing on the bridge in Mitrovica and hence the title, VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE;" new treatment in hand he and Laura were able to secure a small seed grant from the Pacific Pioneer Fund.
A year later, in August 2005, with enough grant money in place to only pay for the plane tickets, Laura, John and cinematographer Sarah Levy left for Kosovo to shoot what they thought would be a fund-raising trailer for the doc. But having a protracted pre-production period and very limited funds (read: maxed out credit cards) turned out to be a blessing in disguise. All the research coupled with the remarkable abilities of Albanian producer Behar Zogiani and Serbian producer Jovica Miljkovic blossomed into 15 of the most arduous, yet amazing shooting days of our lives. When we got on the plane to head back to the states, we knew we had enough material for a feature.
Why has tribalism amongst the ethnic groups of the former Yugoslavia persisted with such force?That's obviously a really tough question, with no easy answer. But when politicians keep drawing distinctions instead of looking for common ground, when people are focused on the past instead of looking to the future, and when the voices of the people in the center are drowned out by the screamers of extremism, you have the start of a recipe for this kind of cyclical violence. One of the things that we touch on the film is that history has been used as a weapon to divide people in Kosovo for hundreds of years. If Serbs and Albanians chose to look for their common heritage and build their common future and forget what happened 600 years ago, that would be a start in breaking the cycle.
I think you also have to look at the history of the region, it's an area that's been conquered and re-conquered over and over. Spending so many centuries under the Ottoman Turks, I think the "tribal instinct" may have developed as a way to preserve the primacy of the local culture in the face of such a strong outside presence.
Have you shown the film in Kosovo? Yes. We took an early cut of the film to Kosovo in January of 2007. We felt a responsibility to the people who had shared so much of their lives with us to let them see and comment on the film before we finished it. Over and over as we were filming, people commented that news crews came time and time again only to "film and go home." We wanted to film and come back, to share our film with the people and get their feedback.
Originally, we fantasized about having a big multi-ethnic screening in Mitrovica near the bridge, but the security problems were too much to overcome. In the end, we had two screenings, one in Pristina for an all-Albanian audience, and one in North Mitrovica for Serbs.
The two screenings were very, very different. Since Kosovar Albanians are very pro-American -- and because our Albanian producer, Behar Zogiani did an amazing job reaching out to the community there, there was a ton of interest in the movie in the south. We were getting interviewed on the radio, on TV, there were articles in the newspaper leading up to this big screening.
The venue was the old national theater, a big old communist era building with seats for about 350 people, but no real movie screen, nor any real digital video projection system. We had to find someone who had stitched together what looked like a dozen bedsheets to create a screen, and Behar found a local businesswoman who had bought a really bright projector for doing outdoor advertisements, but who couldn't use it because her screen was in tatters.
The night of the screening came, and I swear, it felt like almost everyone in Pristina came. There were news crews from Germany, from Reuters, from the UN. There were dozens of US solders from Camp Bondsteel who had driven for hours to get there. There were prominent politicians, lots of important folks from the UN and the OSCE. People were standing in the aisles - the place was packed to the gills.
To add to the drama, I have to give you a little bit of technical context. Because the Albanian dialect spoken in Kosovo, known as Gheg, is very difficult to translate for anyone not born in Kosovo, we couldn't really finalize the subtitles until we got to Kosovo for the screening. This, you can surely imagine, led to a very interesting post-production flow. Basically, I brought a hard drive with a quicktime of the entire movie on it, and basically edited the subtitles with Behar in the days before the screening. Even if it was technically possible, there was no time to output the film to tape. So here we were with a packed audience of 500 people and I was playing the film out of my laptop! (Gotta give kudos to Apple computer here...) Literally tears of joy came to my eyes when I pressed play and everything went off without a hitch.
We weren't really sure what to expect from the audience as they watched the film; they seemed to get it, reacting as we hoped. I remember as the credits rolled what an amazingly emotional moment I felt it was, like we had shared something amazing with this entire community. We stepped up to the stage for a question and answer session, and one of our favorite characters in the movie stood up and asked a question.
Of course, it was in Albanian, so we couldn't understand it, but Laura and I, basking in that post-screening euphoria, thought he was saying how much he liked the film.
Then came the translation: "You spent hours filming me and there's only a few minutes in the film. Why didn't you put in the part about the Serbs stabbing the pregnant woman in the stomach? Why didn't you put in the part about them killing my dog and cat? Were you just trying to be fair to the Serbs?"
We were of course, a little speechless. I think I answered something like "Well, we did put in the part about how you buried the bodies of your friends and family killed by Serbs, bodies without arms, legs and brains, with their name on a slip of paper in a plastic bottle so they could be ID'ed later."
It just got worse from there, really, as we stood up on stage and were verbally attacked by many people - people who we later found out were well known for having extreme viewpoints. They accused us of trying to be "too" balanced and in doing so, unfairly representing the situation.
At one point, a young man stood up and chastised the audience that they hadn't even watched the film, that they weren't even trying to get it, so wrapped up everyone was in their own political viewpoint.
Anyway, we had a videographer filming the event. I got the tape from him and promptly labelled it "The Kosovo Bloodbath." To this day I'm too scared to watch it. We think our Albanian producer, Behar, who's simply one of the most remarkable human beings on the planet, actually got death threats after the screening, though he's never admitted it to us directly.
The next day was the screening for Serbs in Mitrovica. This event was a lot lower key, as the UN had warned us not to publicize it at all, otherwise they couldn't guarantee our safety.
Only problem was, we had spent so much time working to get the Albanian subtitles right for the first screening that we hadn't had time to get the Serbian subtitles ready. We had already had the entire dialogue list of the film translated into Serbian, so it was just a matter of cutting and pasting all the titles into Final Cut Pro on my laptop.
Long story short, Laura and I spent the day furiously typing titles into the computer, only to see the time approaching when we would have to leave the hotel for the drive to Mitrovica.
We were already running late when we finishing inputting. Problem was, we still needed to render out the movie, which would take about an hour. Well, the drive to Mitrovica takes about an hour...
And so we found ourselves in Behar's old Opel, itself a veteran of the war. Laura behind the wheel, me with my laptop - and hard drive - plugged into the cigarette lighter, rendering away. But the cigarette lighter was broken, and the plug wouldn't stay in unless I held it there.
So there we were, driving at night across nightmarishly bumpy, dark Kosovo roads, Laura at the wheel of the old stick-shift Opel and me bent over trying to make sure the cigarette adaptor didn't pull loose. I turned to Laura: "Whatever you do, don't let the car stall." She just sneered.
The titles finished rendering just as we were parking the car in Mitrovica. We had to park on the south (Albanian) side of the bridge, of course, since the car had Kosovo plates and would likely get stoned if we drove it into the north. So we packed up the computer and hard drive and walked across the bridge to the screening.
The reception from the Serbs was pretty chilly overall, but we didn't get a chance to get a lot of feedback from the Serbs in the audience as we were advised that it probably in our best interests NOT to have a Q & A in North Mitrovica.
The post-mortem of all this craziness is this: The European Planning Team for Kosovo, the group taking over responsibility for the province from the UN this year, has adopted the film as part of its training protocol for all its member states, telling us that they thought it was the most compassionate and balanced portrayal of the situation there. They actually bought 27 copies of the movie - one for every member state. We also screened at the Camp Bondsteel, the big US military base in Kosovo, where we got an amazing reception.
What were your biggest challenges when constructing the film in post-production? One of best decisions we made was bringing on Bill Haugse (Hoop Dreams) to edit the film. He has such a gift for the lyrical and poetic, he nailed the tone we were going for right off the bat. That part was easy...
As the title suggests, the film is really a collection of stories, so the biggest challenge was really how to organize and arrange them to make a cohesive and compelling film. It was quite a struggle, to try to make an honest portrayal of the place without biasing the audience one way or the other. Flash cards flying all over the place, the movie taken apart and reassembled over and over again trying to find the alchemy that would make it all stick together.
The other huge problem was figuring how much historical context to put in the film. We definitely needed something in the film to orient the viewer, but we also were determined to make a film that wasn't a history lesson, but an emotional and psychological representation of present-day Kosovo.
Any other projects in the pipeline?Laura's rolling out Refusenik simultaneously with View from the Bridge, while at the same time starting work on her new film about "music rom the bomb shelter" that I mentioned above.
Meanwhile, Towards Darkness, an independent film I DP'd starring America Ferrera, is being released theatrically this spring, and I continue to shoot features, commercials, and docs.
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posted by Brandon Harris @ 1/23/2008 09:45:00 PM
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