A FRAGILE DEMOCRACY

One thing that we have learned on our filming trip is that just because a country is independent does not necessarily mean that it is sovereign. Take Kosovo for instance: although it is a functioning parliamentary representative democracy with independent judiciary and legislative branches, much of the country’s infrastructure is still greatly influenced to various degrees by international organizations. The United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), The European Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX), an International Civilian Representative, and the NATO police force called K-FOR still control or oversee many of the country’s foreign and domestic policy decisions and – in spite of Kosovo’s independent status – occasionally even go so far as treat the country more as a protectorate by negotiating or making decisions on its behalf.

One example of this is the rather startling fact that even now, almost nine months after Kosovo declared independence, the UN continues to negotiate with Serbia about the terms of Kosovo’s independent status. Obviously, that is a concern to people in Kosovo: many of them feel that because they have been promised a democratic state that the international community should not barter their country’s territory on their behalf.

A few days ago, we go this letter from our friend Igo Rogova in Pristina:

Dear Friends and Supporters:

I am writing on behalf of the Kosova Women’s Network (KWN) to request your support. You may be aware that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in consultation with the Government of Serbia has put forth six points that would give Serbia broad administrative powers over Serb majority areas within the Republic of Kosovo, including police, judiciary, transportation and infrastructure, boundaries, customs and religious sites. The six points threaten Kosovo’s territorial sovereignty, violate the Constitution of Kosovo, conflict with the Comprehensive Proposal for the Kosovo Status Settlement proposed by UN Special Envoy Martti Ahtisaari, and jeopardize the fragile peace that has been secured in Kosovo and South East Europe. Further, Serb citizens living in enclaves in Kosovo have indicated their opposition to increased Serbian governmental influence.

Since the democratically elected National Assembly declared Kosovo’s independence on 17 February 2008, Kosovo has been recognized by 52 UN member states, including 22 European Union members. Kosovo has also been recognized by all bordering states except Serbia, including Macedonia, Montenegro and Albania. In accordance with Article 1.1 of our Constitution, “The Republic of Kosovo is an independent, sovereign, democratic, unique and indivisible state.”

The Constitution of Kosovo protects the rights of all citizens, including Serb citizens, rendering Serbian governance unnecessary as well as illegal. The Constitution guarantees Serb representation in the Assembly of the Republic of Kosovo (Art. 63.2(1)), seats as Ministers and Deputy Ministers (Art. 96), access to media in the Serb language (Art. 59(11)), representation on the Kosovo Judicial Council (Art. 108.6(3)) and national language rights (Art. 59(11)). Efforts have been made to include Serb citizens in public institutions, such as the police force.

Thousands of Kosovar citizens plan to march through Prishtina starting at noon on Wednesday, 19 November 2008 to oppose the six points. Citizens will emphasize the illegality of the proposed Serb Government administration through their motto, “Sovereignty comes from people.” The motto echoes Article 2.1 of the Constitution of Kosovo, which states, “The sovereignty of the Republic of Kosovo stems from the people, belongs to the people and is exercised in compliance with the Constitution…” KWN, as a member of the organizing committee together with 20 other organizations, fully supports citizens in this effort, agreeing that any political decision concerning Kosovo should be made by citizens rather than imposed by outside international bodies.

We request your full support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Kosovo. Please join our efforts and the present efforts of the citizens of Kosovo in whatever capacity you can, through advocacy or information-sharing, to oppose any agreement that would give Serbia administrative power over any part of our country. We hope you will join us in calling for international pressure for Serbia to accept the independence and sovereignty of Kosovo, the Kosovo Status Settlement proposed by UN Special Envoy Ahtisaari, and deployment of the European Union Rule of Law Mission (“EULEX”) in northern Kosovo. Such recognition as well as retribution for crimes committed against the citizens of Kosovo in 1998 and 1999 should be a precondition for Serbia’s European Union integration.

We thank you in advance for any support you can offer.

Sincerely,

Igballe Rogova
Executive Director, Kosova Women’s Network


Nearly 100,000 people marched in Pristina on Wednesday to voice their opposition to this six-point plan. The United States, of course, says that it intends to support Kosovo’s government. More information about the UN’s six-point plan can be found here and here.

THE BEST LAID PLANS

It isn’t easy being a documentary filmmaker and a control freak at the same time. While Michaela and I always conceive our films along certain storylines and go into our shoots with a plan and a focus, those storylines can change radically as we uncover new information and the best scenes take on a life of their own once we start filming. To be honest, this spontaneity is actually part of the fun, as it keeps us both on our toes and allows us to reveal something unexpected to our audience; it’s also one of the things that I think makes a film and its protagonists come across as engaging and alive, as opposed to a documentary film where the action is highly scripted. But like anything, this type of filming has its ups and downs – and one of the downs on this particular day was that everything seemed to be going terribly, terribly wrong.

The day had started out promising enough: we had driven to a small Serbian enclave to meet a man who had agreed to share his point of view on how Kosovo’s independent state had affected him and his neighbors. The fact that he would speak to us at all was somewhat of a coup; isolated and feeling discriminated against by larger Albanian Kosovar society, the Serbs who live in these enclaves are quite mistrustful of American or European journalists or filmmakers and largely reluctant to speak to them. But because we were coming with a mutual friend – someone who lived outside his community but had provided significant assistance to this enclave through an international NGO – this man seemed eager to meet us and let us incorporate his story into the film. So here we were, sitting in his dark living room while his very kind wife served us delicious Turkish coffee and he and our mutual friend toasted the occasion with locally-made raki.

Three hours and several rounds of raki later, his mood had changed from friendly to dark. He wanted to talk to us, he said, but didn’t feel safe doing so. What if word got back to Belgrade that he had been complaining about Serbia’s role in controlling the enclaves? What if his neighbors didn’t like him talking to foreign journalists? What if we took his words out of context or mis-translated him? We should have brought a Serbian journalist with us for his protection. We should have found a way to meet him outside the enclave. We shouldn’t have come. Suddenly, what had seemed like a genuine connection and friendly rapport had gone sour. When I asked our translator afterwards if he had any idea what had gone wrong, he theorized that perhaps the unexpected visit of a young neighbor had given our potential protagonist cause to worry: that explanation in itself was revealing of the tensions and anxieties faced by people living in the enclave. But whatever this man’s reasoning, it was clear that no amount of reassurance and discussion was going to change his mind.

What to do? If someone really doesn’t want to speak with us, there’s not much to do but be gracious about it and thank them for their time – at the very least, we have learned something new and there’s always the chance that that person will change his or her mind down the road. If we were doing an investigative piece or an expose about something that would be one thing, but to be able to make this film we need collaborative relationships with our protagonists – so on this sad day, we found ourselves back out on the streets of this old and semi-deserted town, wondering what our next step would be and feeling profoundly disappointed at seeing a very promising lead evaporate right in front of our eyes.

But thankfully, the day was not yet over – and as we walked back towards our car, we happened to pass a group of K-FOR soldiers who were making their daily rounds. Knowing that the area was the responsibility of the German and Austrian forces, Michaela greeted them in German, and almost immediately found herself in a friendly conversation with Commander Manfred Hofer of Camp Casablanca, which oversees security for the southern part of Kosovo. What luck! We had been negotiating with the K-FOR headquarters for weeks, trying to get access to film there, and now here was someone who could make that happen in a moment.

By the time we were on the road to Peja/ Pec again, Michaela had Commander Hofer’s card tucked neatly into her wallet and an invitation to film with him both at the K-FOR base and in the enclave the next week. A tidy lesson for the documentary filmmaker with an inner control freak: good things can happen even when the day doesn’t go according to plan!

THE US CONNECTION

Traveling abroad in recent years, I have become accustomed to polite but pointed questions about the perceived failings of US foreign policy and jokes deriding our current administration. Not so in Albanian Kosovo: in all of my travels, I have never experienced so much unflagging pro-American sentiment.

There is a long-standing relationship between the Albanian people and the American people. At the Paris Peace Conference after World War I, President Woodrow Wilson interceded in a plan that would have divided Albania up and given it to Yugoslavia, Greece, and Italy. Instead, Wilson advocated for – and got – Albania’s independence. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, the United States took in a wave of Kosovar refugees looking to escape the increasingly repressive Yugoslav state, and in 1999 the Clinton administration not only led the NATO bombings meant to stop the ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians but also took in over 20,000 refugees fleeing the war. The second Bush administration continued this favorable attention by flooding the region with aid in the years since the war, acting as the driving force behind international support for Kosovo’s independence, and setting in place a very active Chamber of Commerce working on attracting American investment to the country.

The Albanian and Albanian Kosovar communities have repaid this American support at every possible opportunity. In Kosovo, there are streets named for Bill Clinton, Wesley Clark, Bob Dole, Madeleine Albright, William Walker, and Bronx Congressman Eliot Engel. American flags often fly on government buildings next to the new blue and yellow flag of Kosovo and the striking red and black flag of Albania. There is a replica of the Statue of Liberty on top of the Hotel Victoria. You can buy “I Heart America” t-shirts in Pristina. Albania was one of the first countries to offer troops for the US-led military offensives in Iraq and Afghanistan, and when President George W. Bush became the first serving American president to visit Albania in June 2007, he was mobbed by adoring crowds. American visitors to Kosovo generally receive a enthusiastic triple dose of the famous Albanian hospitality: I met plenty of other Americans who noted with amazement how many people wanted to shake their hand, professed their love for America and their heart-felt gratitude for America’s support, or refused to accept payment for some service or meal because the customer was American.

This unabashed faith in America’s power to do good in the world reminded me of a man I met several years ago, when I was filming a short documentary about a group of friends from a gay country and western bar in New Orleans who had banded together to help repair their neighborhood after Katrina. Houcine was originally from Tunisia, but had lived in New Orleans for almost eighteen years, building a great career in New Orleans’ jazz world and becoming very active in his community. When I asked him how he had come to live in the United States, Houcine told me that coming to America had been a dream ever since he was a kid. He recalled that in Tunisia in the 1960s America was seen as the true force of democracy, and that the love for America was so strong that after JFK’s assassination, he and his friends and neighbors had walked for miles to gather around the closest television so that they could watch the funeral and mourn with America. Even as many of his neighbors in New Orleans became bitter or cynical about the government’s handling of the Katrina disaster, Houcine’s feelings about the United States were so strong that he found it difficult to criticize the country that symbolized so much to him as a youth and had given him the opportunity to live openly as a gay man as he never would have been able to do in Tunisia. As I listened to him speak, I was struck by the chasm between America’s standing as a global symbol of democracy then and now, and I felt sad that a generation’s worth of work to build legitimacy for U.S. democracy promotion abroad has been so carelessly thrown away.

Certainly, the United States’ foreign policy in Kosovo has not been without its detractors, and not every Kosovar that I met (especially Serbian Kosovars) believed that American policy in the region was without an ulterior motive. But as an American who has witnessed a lot of anti-Americanism abroad in recent years, particularly in Europe, it was certainly a surprise to see that the United States as a symbol and instrument of democracy still stands so strongly intact in at least one part of the world.

THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE

Between us, Michaela and I speak English, German, French, and enough Spanish to get by in a pinch. What we don’t know – and which would obviously come in very much handy here – is either Albanian or Serbian. Because of this, we hired a translator. Fluent in Albanian, Serbian, English, and German, Kesi worked as a professional translator in Germany for many years before moving to Kosovo to start a business as an environmental engineer. He’s quick enough to do simultaneous translations, which really helps keep the flow of an interview going. He is culturally sensitive to the idiosyncrasies of both Serbian and Albanian culture. He is fun to be around, which is a big bonus since we are all spending so much time together. As the person we had planned on working with turned out to have taken another job when we arrived, we are especially lucky to have found Kesi through the friend of a friend.

In the United States, the idea that language is political is usually framed in terms of “freedom of speech” or of a powerful person strategically using euphemisms or vagueness to conceal or prevent thought or action. Both of these issues were relevant in Yugoslavian Kosovo too: conditions were hardly conducive to people expressing themselves freely or hearing their realities reflected in the words of those who governed them. But there was also another dimension to the politics of language, which was that although Albanians made up almost 70% of the population, the language of public life was Serbian.

This meant that while Albanians were free to speak their own language at home, outside the home - at school, at work, and for any business related to the State - they were forced to use Serbian. This had been the case since the Yugoslav state was formed in 1918. Although Tito eased this a bit by stopping the “Serbian-izing” of Albanian names and allowing some Albanian-speaking schools to be established, Serbian nationalism rose again after his death and saw many of those changes reversed. The Albanian-language university in Pristina was closed in 1991. Government funding was withdrawn from the few existing Albanian-language schools. Street signs were renamed in Serbian and written in Cyrillic script. No state-owned television or radio was allowed to broadcast in Albanian. In the U.S. it is easy to forget this language aspect of human rights, because English is a world language and it would be almost impossible to take away our right to use it when we please. In Kosovo the effect of this policy was to reinforce a structure where Albanians and Albanian culture were continually suppressed – something which greatly contributed to ethnic tensions and resentment.

Since the end of the war, Albanians have regained the public use of their language, and Albanian now stands with Serbian and Turkish as the country’s official languages. Additionally, Kosovo recognizes Gorani, Romani, and Bosnian. Sadly, the legacy of the language policies of the Serbian nationalists who long controlled the region is still divisive: although many Albanians learned both Albanian and Serbian in order to get by, few Serbs of the same age group speak Albanian - which helps make it difficult for Serb communities to become a part of the new Kosovo. And unfortunately, fewer and fewer young people of either ethnicity are fluent in both languages. Young people of both groups are usually working very hard on their English or German, as most of the few well-paying jobs are with internationals, and knowing these languages can be a ticket to opportunity. As Kesi pointed out one day, it will soon be easiest for people to speak to each other in English, which isn’t even one of the country’s official languages.

THE SECRET LIFE OF SHOES

Kosovo is somewhat of a dusty place. Much of this dust comes from the country’s power plants. Some of it comes from the poor emissions standards on cars, the many unpaved roads, and the constant construction. All this dust makes for consistently dramatic and beautiful pink and orange-hued sunsets. It also makes for very dirty shoes.

The first week that we were here, Michaela and I both noticed that not only are Kosovar women exceptionally lovely but that they always seemed to have perfectly clean shoes. We marveled at this: our own shoes seemed to have a permanent layer of brownish-red film. Like many civilized people, Kosovars remove their shoes inside their homes or when visiting other people’s houses - and as we placed our own dusty boots next to a row of perfectly polished, carefully-lined up shoes and slid on the slippers offered by our host, I felt a tinge of embarrassment at their condition.

This awareness of my dirty shoes took on a new dimension after my few days in Kosovo, when we moved from Pristina to Peja/ Pec. The morning after my first night there, we went outside to put our boots on and head off, only to find that they were completely clean and blacked. As we stood there being pleasantly surprised, the woman who ran the house where we were staying walked past me, lifted up my shoe, ran a shoe brush over it a few times to knock off any minor dust that had settled on it overnight, and handed it to me to put on. I thanked her mightily in my limited Albanian, but wondered whether I might inadvertently have offended her with my rude shoes. I made a mental note to ask a friend later about it.

When I asked my friend later, she told me that hospitality in this part of the world is such that often your shoes are attended to by your hostess and brought to you again clean when it is time to leave. In Kosovo, it is sign of respectability to have clean shoes. Your shoes may be worn, but at least they should be clean! Look there, she said, and pointed out a young woman across the street. The woman was getting ready to go into a government building and looked to be dressed for an appointment, with a briefcase and a slightly nervous look on her face. As I watched, she took a small piece of cloth out of her bag, knelt down gracefully, and wiped her heels clean with a quick and polished movement. Then she stood up, and after quickly assessing her work she continued into the building. My friend looked at me and smiled. You might want to get one of those pieces of cloth, she said.

BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A TIRE?

It was the end of a very long day and we were speeding down the black road, headed back to our home base in Peja/ Pec. Scarfing down cheese burek from our favorite fast-food take out place in Pristina and gulping down Schweppes Bitter Lemon, we were keeping each other awake by singing bad old songs from the 70s. Kesi, our translator, was regaling us up with a hammy version of Take Me Home Country Road when we all suddenly became aware of a strange sound accompanying his crooning.

We fell silent and listened. Ba-bump. Ba-bump. Ba-bump. By now we were noticing that the ride seemed rougher than usual as well. I think I had better pull over, Michaela said, and eased our trusty Opel onto the narrow ridge of grass that lined the roadway.

We got out and examined the tires. Sure enough, the one on the front right was hopelessly deflated. A look in the trunk revealed that the spare was also completely flat. The three of us looked at each other dejectedly, suddenly feeling the cold night air of the mountains pressing in as we realized that the closest help was miles away. I tilted my head back and noticed that I could see the Milky Way quite clearly. All around us it was very very quiet. I checked my watch and saw that it was 11:45pm. We still had over 30 km to drive.

Kesi had just gotten on the phone with his younger brother when a pair of bright headlights came roaring over the horizon, headed our way. An ancient Honda Civic rattled loudly past us and pulled into the driveway of a partially-built brick house about twenty feet up the road. All of the car’s doors flew opened at once and four men spilled out, accompanied by a blast of techno music. The driver, wearing a tan Member’s Only bomber jacket and pulling deeply on the cigarette hanging from his lips, strode purposefully to the trunk of the car and yanked it open so the others could peer inside. The tallest, an older man wearing a suit, glanced in the trunk and nodded his approval. In low tones, the four of them had a short, heated discussion, slammed the trunk shut, and were headed back into the car when the driver saw us standing there staring dumbly. He stalked over and pointed at us. As Kesi explained our situation, the man abruptly turned back to his car, reached in the trunk, and came back with a spare tire. He tossed it on the grass in front of us, turned away without saying a word, got in his car, and sped off. The whole thing had taken about three minutes.

As nice as it was to have the spare, we were still without a jack or tire iron. Soon, however, another car sped into view: Kesi’s younger brother. With barely a hello, he jumped out of his car with tools in hand. Quickly, he replaced the tire - and merely nodding in the direction of our profuse expressions of gratitude, he jumped back in his car and peeled off in the direction from whence he came.

Back on the road again, we rode in silence, reflecting on our good fortune in having had our situation so handily resolved. It is interesting, I remarked, that in a country where it sometimes seems to so difficult to arrange a simple appointment or make plans for anything ahead of time that every significant problem that we’ve encountered seems to miraculously work out with so little effort. Kesi laughed. That’s the upside of our national culture of spontaneity, he said. In Kosovo, someone is always available to help.

PEJA, PAST AND PRESENT

While filming in Kosovo, we have been living mainly in Peja/ Pec. Situated at the foothills of the Accursed Mountains on the border of Montenegro, Peja/ Pec emerged as a regional hub in the middle ages and is now the second largest city in Kosovo. It is framed by some of the country’s most beautiful scenery: rugged mountains above, rich, fertile valleys below, and the Bistrica River running through the center of town. There is nothing starting the day by enjoying a coffee on one of the house’s three patios while taking in the view. We are very happy to be staying here.

The 1999 war hit Peja/ Pec particularly hard: nearly all of its Albanian residents were displaced as the Yugoslav army and Serbian police burned down over 80% of the city, including many traditional stone kullas and Ottoman-era homes. Although its setting is still quite beautiful and much of the city has been nicely rebuilt, almost everyone that we met from Peja/ Pec still greatly laments the loss of the city they knew. To make the loss even more acute, few residents have anything other than their memories to help them recall what that beautiful past looked like, as they were not allowed to take any of their belongings when they were forced to leave. You can still get a tiny glimpse of what the city must have looked like from a walk through the few remaining buildings of the old bazaar, but the old city is lost forever.

Staying in Peja reminded me of a book that I read many years ago in an urban planning class in college. Written by Bogdan Bogdanovich, a former mayor or Belgrade and a virulent opponent of Serbian nationalism, The City and Death discusses the consequences for urban environments in civil war. Bogdanovich muses that the seemingly gratuitous destruction of everyday built environments (such as houses, shops, squares, car parks) is done not simply to terrorize the population. The destruction actually reflects the conqueror’s desire to completely eradicate any trace of human or material variety in his quest to construct an “uncomplicated” historical narrative that denies the complexity of the place’s history. He suggests that perhaps this widespread destruction of the buildings of civilian life should be prosecuted as a distinct form of political violence. The civilized world, Bogdanovich writes, will never forget the way we destroyed our cities. We Serbs shall be remembered as despoilers of cities, latter-day Huns. The horror felt by the West is understandable: for centuries it has linked the concepts 'city' and 'civilization' - associating them even on an etymological level. It therefore has no choice but to view the destruction of cities as flagrant, wanton opposition to the highest values of civilization.

FILMING STRANGERS

Although I love being a camerawoman, part of me has always been a bit uncomfortable with the inevitable part of filmmaking that requires aiming the camera at ordinary people going about their business in public in order to visually establish the life of a place. If people know that I’m filming, then I have no compunction about just diving in and getting the best images that I can - but if someone is just relaxing on a bench and enjoying a cigar or waiting for the bus or having an animated discussion in a café… well, aren’t we are all entitled to a little bit of privacy, even in public? Unless someone is a public figure or is making a public spectacle of himself or I am in an unbelievably crowded public place like Times Square then I really have to psyche myself up and overcome a certain amount of discomfort in order to get those images.

Because of this, I generally ask people if they mind me filming them before I do so, and I always do this when I travel outside the U.S. The downside of this is that sometimes people will cheerily agree and then – no matter how much you request that they shouldn’t - happily stare right at the camera as you are filming, which is not usually the desired effect. The upside of this is that it gives you an opportunity to make contact with people you wouldn’t otherwise meet and sometimes have even an interesting conversation. As a result of random conversations with strangers whom I have asked to film, I have found out such things as: the best place in Pristina to get a wide shot of the city; how to say “all the best” in Albanian; that the water in Peja/ Pec is rumored to give kidney stones because it has so much calcium; and how to get to Ferizaj/ Urosevac via the nice new road that isn’t yet on the map. People in Kosovo are generally very friendly and when they find out that we are from the United States and Germany they are curious to learn more about what we are doing.

The most curious of all, of course, are the kids. Several times I have looked up from setting my shot to find a group of them hanging back and looking on shyly. Inevitably, my former days as a teaching artist and video instructor kick in and I feel that it would just be wrong not to take a few moments to invite them to take a look at what I am doing. Today, I got swarmed by this very nice group of young people, who – after enthusiastically practicing their English on me - asked me if I would take their photo near the old socialist statue that I was filming in Peja/ Pec.

THE U.S. ARMY TO THE RESCUE

Needless to say, it is extremely inconvenient to lock your keys in your car with only an hour to get to your next location. It is even more inconvenient to make such an error in a small town in Kosovo on a Sunday, when absolutely nothing is open and you barely speak a word of Albanian to communicate your dilemma to the few people you see walking a few blocks away who may be able to help you. And yet that is the sad situation we found ourselves in a couple of days ago: we jumped out to get a quick shot and no sooner were we out of the car than we realized that the key that Michaela had in her hand was not the one that would let us back in. We looked sadly at the car key sitting on the dashboard. We tried to push down the car windows with our fingertips. We attempted to pick the lock with a pointy stick. But as none of these things actually had any useful result, we leaned against the car to discuss the situation.

What to do? Granted, our trusty German-made Opel was certainly not the greatest car. Rented to us from the friend of a friend, it lacks the hi-beam that would be helpful on Kosovo’s inky night roads, has a broken trunk and a tendency to stall out if it sits in the sun for more than two hours, and rattles like mad if it goes over 60 KPH. Many times we cursed its fussy ways and fantasized about the day when we would be able to roll over Kosovo’s bumpy roads comfortably and speedily in a snazzy jeep. Still, now that our little car was suddenly inaccessible we longed for its dusty, cramped interior again, and wondered how we’d ever regain access to it. Michaela looked at her watch and noticed that thirty minutes had passed. We hoped that some kind of help would come along soon.

Enter the U.S. Army Reserve, in the form of Mr. Marks and Mr. Bohner and their Albanian translator, Mr. Gashi. Climbing up on the elevated train tracks, Michaela spied the trio peering into a large hole about fifty feet away and appealed for their assistance. Gamely, they scrambled over – and while Mr. Gashi tried to trick the lock with various of his own keys, Mr. Marks and Mr. Bohner told us a little about their experiences in Kosovo. As it turns out, they were from Missouri, and were both quite happy to have been deployed to Kosovo as they had spent the previous eighteen months in Iraq: as Mr. Boehner put it, as long as nobody’s shooting at me, I’m okay. And they were shooting at me in Iraq. I’d rather stay here. We asked them about the hole they had been so closely examining on the other side of the train tracks, and found out that recent construction had uncovered the remains of an old Ottoman prison, which was turning into quite a local curiosity.

Suddenly, we heard the old familiar creak of our trusty little Opel’s door squeak open. Mr. Gashi was pleased with himself. My brother has one of these, he said. I knew that I could get in! There was much thanking (us) and much protesting that no thanks was necessary (them) and with many smiles and handshakes we were off and not a moment late to our next shoot.

THE BUILDING BOOM

When the war ended in 1999, close to 30% of Kosovo’s housing stock was destroyed or damaged, and the country has been building like crazy ever since. One of the things that we immediately noticed when we arrived in Kosovo was the vast vista of partially-constructed houses. Concrete cores with sticks of rebar poking out; brick shells with empty eyes for windows; triple-deckers with one floor lived in and two floors temporarily used for hanging the washing or storing construction materials… the endless array of unfinished homes is a visual indicator that houses in Kosovo have traditionally been built little by little, as the owners can pay for them. Here – as in many poor countries - cash is king, and you pay as you go.

Unfortunately, there appears to be little oversight to the way that buildings go up. Orange and yellow ten-story buildings will suddenly fill a lot, butting right up against modest one-story homes. Bright modern stores glazed in showy rounded glass rise next to a socialist-era apartment building and an Ottoman-style house. Many Kosovars complaint not only about this visual anarchy but also about another striking fact: zoning laws, planning commissions, organized coordination with electric or sewage companies, safety laws for construction sites – all are either non-existent or rarely enforced. Already complicated by the falling Yugoslav government’s transition to free-market capitalism in the 1990s and the Serbian state’s attempt to bolster the Kosovar Serb population by selling previously public land to Serbs for very little money, property issues became even more contentious after the war, as properties were destroyed or abandoned and massive migrations occurred. Land disputes are common, and urban planners have found that trying to gain control for their municipality is a challenge. Most famous is the case of Rexhep Luci, Pristina’s leading urban planner, who announced his opposition to the problem of illegal construction in the fall of 2000. After documenting over 2,000 cases, Luxi issued his first three decisions ordering the demolition of the most blatant of illegal structures, including a restaurant built in the middle of a public park. Soon after, Luci was shot dead, and the murder has not been solved.

Now - for those Kosovars who not only have the desire to live in an organized environment but the means to afford it – there’s International Village: the country’s first American-style gated community. Located just five minutes away from downtown Pristina, it bills itself as an oasis in an increasingly congested and chaotic urban landscape. The development offers its own waste-treatment processing, a paid security force, self-sufficient geo-thermal heating in each home, fixtures and finishings imported from the US and Europe, community features such as a pool, gym and clubhouse, and a board that decides upon community standards. Funded by international investors, it also offers potential residents the first mortgage opportunities ever in Kosovo – a big deal for a traditionally cash-based country. International Village is also the city’s first properly deeded and registered development in the city. Recently, International Village’s Bekim Tahiri showed us around the place and told us about the company’s plans. But with a mortgage crisis in the rest of the world, will Kosovo embrace the new opportunity to buy houses on loan? Is this new deeded, registered landscape a harbinger of things to come for Kosovo municipalities? And with price tags starting at over 300,000 Euros in a country where the average income is $1800, who will buy here? The progress of International Village and the people who move in should offer valuable insight not only into Kosovo’s changing economy but also into the opportunity for developers to make an impact on the country’s urban planning.

WHERE THE STREETS HAVE NO NAME

It's often the little things that tell you a lot about a place - and in Kosovo, one of the things that reveals a lot about the country is its roadways.

Much of our filming has taken place in the capital city of Prishtina, a dusty, bustling city of over 300,000 people spread out over several miles of hills and valleys.  The biggest challenge in filming there has been getting around.  Interestingly enough, street names are almost never designated by any sort of sign, and most people do not use them.  Even the people who work at the city's many hotels or restaurants have no idea of their street number or name!  Rather, people will refer to a nearby landmark, such as "the place around the corner from the cinema" or "across the street from the municipality building".  Part of the reason for this confusion may be that street names in Prishtina have typically been highly politicized, changing according to who was in power.  The latest change in 2001, for instance, saw over 500 communist-inspired or Yugoslav street names written in Serb-Croat renamed.  Out went Rruga (street) Marshal Tito, and in came Rr Nene Tereza (named after Mother Theresa, an ethnic Albanian).  Kosovo Film Street became Rr Tony Blair.  Rr Belgrade is now called Rr Tirana.  But even with the new Albanian-friendly names, we've found that to get around our best bet has been to memorize landmarks rather than street names.  It seems that even taxi drivers use this technique to orient themselves toward their destinations.

The larger roads which connect cities and villages are also remarkably un-named, and it is not uncommon to come to a major crossroads or traffic circle that is completely free of any indication as to which of the many avenues to take to continue one's journey.  When I mentioned this to an Albanian friend, he explained that that lack of signs is a hold-over from the last days of communism; because the authorities did not want people moving from place to place to organize a resistance, they stopped the production of maps and decided that they would only maintain the road that tourists were likely to use on their way to Macedonia.  Although that is certainly a good explanation for how things came to be in such a state, one does wonder why such a crucial part of the country's infrastructure is not in better shape after the more than 33 billion Euros that the international community has spent to aid the country over the last ten years.

All this is not to say that the roads are completely sign-free, however!  When one passes through a city, the name of the city is always noted in both Albanian and Serbian, and you can often tell the mood of the city by the fact that one of the names (usually the Serbian version) has been spray-painted or meticulously scraped out so that it is no longer readable.

And then there are the mysterious signs like the one in the photo.  We have seen this curious sign many times and yet nobody that we have asked about it seems to know what it means.  A radical attempt to get jaded drivers to pay more attention to what's on the roadway?  An industrious use of leftover signs donated from Iceland?  A post-modern art project?  We suspect that none of these guesses from our Kosovar friends are accurate - please let us know if you have any insight into this matter!

TEAMWORK

Since we share the producing and directing credits on the projects that we do together, people often ask us how that works. Do we split every task exactly down the middle? Do we make every single decision together? Do we take make a tidy little chart to keep track of who is doing the things that neither on of us likes to do but that are necessary to get the work done? Thankfully, the answer to all of these questions is no. Really, the point of having a production partner is to do less work, not more - so we are both fortunate to have found someone that we can trust to do the things that she says she will do and to make decisions that the other will likely be pleased with. Although we communication a lot about what we are each doing, we do not have to micro-manage each other every step of the way. We’re also both believers in the two-heads-are-better-than-one school of thought – although I say that with the caveat that one obviously has to like the head that one is collaborating with! But fortunately for us, Michaela and I have found that working as a team allows us not only to do things that we would not have been able to do alone, and also makes the doing of them a lot more fun.

Perhaps one of the reasons that our collaboration feels very natural to us is because we are both of a mind that documentary filmmaking is such a collaborative medium already. Let’s face it: it is very unlikely that you are going to be able to film anything interesting if you barge onto the scene with potential protagonists and expect to be let into their lives immediately or you approach a topic or a person without a genuine curiosity and willingness to learn something new. Patience with and honesty in building relationships, a true desire to learn about and understand other people’s points of view, an open-ness to doing things differently than you might have imagined: these are all things that are key not only in documentary filmmaking but in a co-producing and co-directing relationship as well. Also crucial to both documentary filmmaking and a successful creative partnership is a willingness to check your ego at the door and to remember that - while your voice as a filmmaker and your point of view are obviously important – ultimately the filmmaking process is not about you and what a great director you are. It’s about making a great film, and humbly and gratefully accepting the help of others on the way. Without the help of others, a documentary filmmaker is pretty much sunk.

So how does all this work for us, practically-speaking? Well… we brainstorm, divide up and carry out tasks as our individual circumstances and interests dictate, discuss some more, reorganize and move forward based on the results of our work, talk again, and continue on in that vein until the project is done. In this way, the film evolves into something that we both have ownership of. This general approach continues regardless of whether we are working with a larger crew in the field, or whether I am filming and she is doing sound, as we are for this project.

More power to teamwork!

NEWBORN KOSOVO

In the middle of Kosovo's capital city of Pristina, yellow letters over six feet tall spell out the word "newborn". Erected by a team of artists shortly before Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in February of this year, the sculpture has been signed by over 150,000 people including the president and the prime minister. Images of joyous, flag-waving Kosovars celebrating their newly-democratic state in front of the newborn sculpture were broadcast to newly every corner of the globe by an international media that had followed the dramatic story of the new country's birth for many months. It seemed that after years of looking to their past to define their identity, Kosovars could finally look to the future, with the bright hope of a new democracy at their fingertips.

Today, eight months after independence, Kosovars are still focussed on the future. But as the international community begins to withdraw NGOs and the international media hs moved on to other areas of the world, Kosovo is left to stand on its own two feet. The work of building a democracy has become less abstract and the challenges of shaping it into something that will fulfill the high expectations of both its citizens and the international community is coming into sharp relief. It isn't easy, building a democratic state from scratch - and with only 47 out of 192 U.N. member states having recognized the legality of Kosovo's independence, there's a lot of pressure for Kosovars to make their case to the world. And even more importantly, for a region that has been at the mercy of so many other states - from the Romans to the Byzantines to the Ottomans to the Serbs - Kosovars finally have a chance to prove to themselves that they are up to the task.

But what does democracy look like to people who have never known one? What does it take to achieve it? How does it fund itself? What does it take to ensure that all of its citizens are able to participate? Must it compromise some of its constituents' needs in order to be inclusive to those with opposing desires? How does one make its institutions accountable to its citizens?

North America and Western Europe advertise democracy as the most human and most desirable form of state, and have made it their mission to support emerging democracies throughout the world. The fact is that - with a few exceptions - democracies not only do not make war with other democratic states, but also indicate a more contented population: studies of democracies suggest that choosing to live in a democratic society is one very important marker by which we can judge whether a society is happy.

In Kosovo, the question is whether or not a democratic society will work. Can the institutions and values - trust, tolerance, and cooperation - that make democratic society possible overcome ethnic tensions, mistrust, and intolerance that have kept the region in the grip of intractable conflict? And what is really the basis of democracy? Can it work in societies where more than 60% of people do not have jobs? Can people build a democratic system on the ashes of a civil war? And what is the best way for the international community to help?

Those are the questions that we had at the beginning of our research. Through months and months of investigation and careful relationship-building with media-wary Albanian and Serb Kosovars, we have found unusual protagonists with strong motivations and goals whose stories will address these questions in depth. Yesterday we met one of our protagonists for the first time: the Kosovar Minister of Justice Nekibe Kelmendi was kind enough to interrupt one of her parliamentary sessions for a first meeting with us. We knew that she was a strong person: after the Serb paramilitary killed her husband (a prominent human rights lawyer) and two sons in retribution for her husband's appeal to the Hague that Milosevic be indicted for war crimes, she kept on fighting for independence and against corruption in Kosovo. As a woman fighting for justice in a traditionally male-dominated, predominantly Muslim society, she is just one of the many incredible people that have agreed to share their stories with us for the film.

Timing is Everything

Earlier this year, in May, I attended HotDocs as a representative of the feature documentary film Jesus Loves You.  After hearing people rave about the event for so many years, I was really enjoying the whole festival experience: the opportunity to overwhelm my senses with creative and inspired films, the easy camaraderie of my fellow filmmakers, and the small-world, hey-I -know-you moments that are surprisingly common in the doc world.  It was also a thrill to see Jesus Loves You on the big screen in form of a live audience and hear from them at the Q & A afterwards.  The post-screening discussion after our showing at the 2008 Berlinale in February had been very much influenced by the skeptical  view of Germans on religion - and especially on missionaries - so co-director Robert Cibis and I were curious to learn how the reactions of our HotDocs audience would mesh with what we'd heard before.  One thing that really surprised me was that the Canadian audience laughed at very different parts of the film than the German audience did.  Altogether, I had the impression that the viewers at HotDocs enjoyed the film largely because of the cultural clashes between American missionaries and German soccer fans, while the German audiences tended to feel some degree of alarm and indignation that the Americans had come to Germany at all.

Another thing that I loved about the festival was the delegates area.  A Canadian friend was nice enough to put me up in royal style for the week that I was there, but since she lived rather far from downtown Toronto, I spent quite a lot of my time between screenings in the Delegates Area - taking advantage of the wi-fi, running into friends that I hadn't seen for a while, and meeting new people.  But the best thing about the delegates area was that if I hadn't been there, I would not have met the lovely Cynthia Close, and Crossing the Bridge would likely not have found such a great fiscal sponsor.

And this is where the title of this post comes into play.  I'm sitting checking my email, and I glance up and see a cheerful-looking blond woman looking around for a place to sit.  It gets pretty crowded in that area, and there weren't a lot of choices.  Since I happened to have room at my table, I spontaneously offered to drag a chair over from another area and share my table with her.

Naturally, we started chatting - and one of the things that came up was the name of my company, Raisin Bomber Films.  What is a Raisin Bomber, Cynthia asked.  When I explained to her the meaning of our name Raisin Bomber and that my father was one of the kids who was more than eager to get some of the American candies, Cynthia said And my father was one of the pilots who did not drop candies but bombs on Berlin!  At first, I thought what a coincidence, but then I realized: no, it is not a coincidence - it just shows how even the most horrible situations can eventually lead to friendships.  And that we Germans tend to forget how closely we are related to Americans.  After all, people with German heritage are still the largest self-imported ancestry group in the United States.  Maybe the "wurst" and "sauerbraten" heritage even explains the American passion for fatty food... just kidding...

When Cynthia asked about some of the projects that Elizabeth and I had taken on, I told her about Crossing the Bridge, our film on democracy-building in Kosovo.  I told her that our next step in the film's development was to find a fiscal sponsor.  And that's when she told me about the fiscal sponsorship program at Documentary Educational Resources.

I knew of DER's reputation as one of the leading distributors of ethnographic and documentary film, of course, but I confess that I had been unaware of their fiscal sponsorship program.  But soon Cynthia's unbridled enthusiasm for our project and DER's stellar reputation put them at the top of our list of fiscal sponsorship possibilities.  We also liked that DER's mission is to support filmmakers rather than to promote any particular political agenda.  It's very important to Elizabeth and me that Crossing the Bridge present the many facets of Kosovo's very complex story and not just advocate for any one perspective.  There are films when that approach is appropriate, of course, but for this story - when so many people on all "sides" are trying to transcend their collective histories to make a democracy that is vital and inclusive... well, it just seems wrong not to show as much of that as we can.

So there you have it: a chance meeting; an odd coincidence of fathers' histories; and a new fiscal sponsor.  We are thrilled to be sponsored by DER: thank you to Cynthia and the other fine folks there for supporting our film!

And, by the way, if you wish to help support Crossing the Bridge, all you have to do is to CLICK HERE.