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!