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.