Reconciliation through video

18 March 2005

The heads of radio and television networks in the five republics that have replaced Yugoslavia rarely get emotional over the programmes they broadcast: they are professionals trying to survive in complex political situations. Yet when they were shown Videoletters, a series of documentary films, they cried.

Even more remarkably, all agreed to broadcast at least 10 of the 20 episodes, which take the form of a videoletter from a person in one country to an enemy in another.

And not just any enemy, but the bitterest of enemies - enemies who were once friends, neighbours or colleagues, before war drove them apart.

Amazingly, what the film-makers have documented and are currently showing at the Human Rights Watch film festival in London - is mostly not confrontation, but reconciliation.

In one episode, a Muslim mother looking for the bones of her children makes a videoletter to a former camp guard. When the film crew tried to find the guard they were threatened: many people do not want their roles in the Balkan wars made public. The crew failed to trace the guard, but found a Serbian soldier who, in director Eric van den Broeks words, also didnt have clean hands. The soldier and the mother spoke on the phone, after which he and others helped her find her familys bones.

The lesson for van den Broek is clear: If you persevere, you will always find the good in people.

The lesson, he admits, came as a surprise, and took time to learn. I got angry over Serbs killing ordinary people on the streets and I had to turn this anger into a positive feeling instead of confronting them.

We always asked people how they feel now, rather than trying to blame them. If you keep on asking and not blaming, they will understand themselves on a different level. After a two-to-three-hour interview, after 10 years of silence, they will admit they were wrong.

They are all victims. Even the perpetrators wake up in the middle of the night screaming, he says.

This positive attitude was reinforced when he and fellow film-maker Katarina Rejger showed Videoletters to different people in the former Yugoslavia. The effect, he says, was enough to soften even the staunchest of nationalists, to encourage perpetrators to recognise their own guilt and to inspire viewers to find their own others.

Making the videos was time-consuming (four years), sometimes dangerous and always difficult: You are asking people who have bad experiences of the media and who are under pressure from their neighbours and family and employers. In two cases, arising from events in Kosovo, there are still problems with protagonists, under pressure from others who do not wish the videoletter and the events they describe to be made public.

In most of the episodes the people meet at the end and in most cases they are still in contact. They will see each other again at a screening in Sarajevo on 2 April.

The reaction at Sarajevo, says Van den Broek, is unpredictable This has never been done before.

He thinks there will be a rise in attempts by friends-turned-enemies to find each other.

Radio talk shows around the film will enable people to phone in to reconnect with lost contacts. A reconciliation website is to be set up there are no borders to cross there onto which people can download their own videoletters.

About 30,000 people are still missing in the former Yugoslavia, and the film-makers hope that people who know where the bones are will put anonymous tips on the website.

Van den Broek and Rejger also hope to set up an organisation to train people to promote reconciliation through video diaries in other countries that have experienced similar traumas, such as parts of Russia and in Iraq.
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Links
*Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, London
*Videoletters website
*OneWorld Events