An Inner Exodus: The Many Diasporas of Balkan Cinema

I have often been told that language evolves more slowly in the colony than in the homeland, if only because the exile holds tenaciously to his dying roots. To quote migrant Macedonian filmmaker Mitko Panov, "You speak your own language more grammatically. You avoid using outdated colloquialisms because you don't know the new ones. You end up asking why you are talking like a book." Similarly, migrant filmmakers always face the danger that they will make just such films about their abandoned homeland, because the trauma of departure has frozen in time their cultural references.

Emigration is a traumatic event (in the strictly Freudian sense) for whatever reason it is undertaken, and filmmakers of the diaspora create from a base of latent trauma—the psychic disaster of their own exodus—whether they are aware of it or not. Mitko Panov left Macedonia at the age of nineteen to study directing in Poland. From there he went to film school in the United States and later migrated once more to Switzerland. His remarkable short film With Raised Hands (Z podniesionymi rekami, 1986) won the Palme d'Or at Cannes for its reconstruction of the infamous photograph of the boy with his hands held up under German guns in the Warsaw ghetto. Despite this widely recognized debut, Panov's subsequent career has been strewn with interruptions, due at least in part to his various migrations and his international teaching engagements.

The short film Livada (1998) found him back in Macedonia with an intercultural fable of friendship between a Muslim peasant and an Orthodox doctor; and his major documentary Comrades conveyed him right across the Balkans, retracing the protagonists of another photograph, a carefree snapshot of his former comrades of the Yugoslav "Peace Army" in 1981, once-happy conscripts now on opposite sides of a bloody civil war, front-line victims of an inner exodus inflicted by the breakup of their state. Their lack of rancor left him baffled and even more of an outsider.

During 2006, I advised Panov on his new full-length screenplay with the working title The War Is Over. The film deals with the anguished exile to Switzerland of an Albanian Serb teacher during the Kosovar crisis, a man who withers once separated from his cultural roots. With permissible hyperbole, Panov told me that, "Diaspora is the biggest trauma of all. Think of the early pioneers who simply got in a boat and sailed away, never to return. I can scarcely imagine their sacrifice, the inner turmoil, the pain of separation. The shock was so great it was still felt by the second and third generations, who grow up like resilient mutants, a shock that makes the United States what it is."

Though clearly a vessel for his own experience, Panov's suffering teacher of The War Is Over is based on an old army comrade whom he happened upon recently as a stateless person in Switzerland, an example of how an accomplished film writer displaces autobiography the better to tell it. Panov himself, although an exile, has never been a refugee and he is neither Albanian nor Serb but a Macedonian Slav. He has never been caught up in a war zone nor suffered such extreme alienation as his subject. "What's the difference?," he told me with the ingrained self-effacement of the dramatist. "All experience is common." The asylum-seeking teacher Rasim stands not for his author but for displaced humanity.

"Without leaving home I would never talk like this," Panov muses and, turning to his Israeli producer Assaf Shapira, adds, "It's the Exodus that makes you who you are." He might be quoting from Freud, using a diasporic vocabulary laid down in the Pentateuch and perpetuated in the concepts of yerida and aliya. But does the cinema of exile obey the same rules as language? Does it wither or flourish, stultify or diversify? Does the filmmaker's voice develop or fall silent? In other words: to what extent is a filmmaker dependent on his or her roots? More simply, can the trauma of exile yield a good film? One also cannot help wondering whether the wisdom that Mitko Panov acquired abroad was an adequate return for the loss of roots which hisyerida inflicted, especially since, by a cruel irony, the Western European film market dominated by the festivals and run by an intellectual elite takes far more interest in the seriously "ethnic" output of undiscovered first-time directors—particularly from fashionably war-torn regions—than in the complex, reflective offerings that spring from the complex identity of the migrant.

Today's diaspora experience is a far more complicated affair than a one-way ticket in steerage class. You can always catch the next flight home. As a filmmaker you're likely to spend time at international markets and festivals in search of coproducers from opposite ends of the earth. Far from reducing the trauma of emigration, however, mobility paradoxically may intensify it through a compulsive "acting out" in a hapless pattern of aliya and yerida. No going or returning is ever complete or adequate, however often repeated.

Having made yerida, Panov's teacher fears nothing more than the impending aliya imposed by the Swiss authorities who wish to send him back. He knows that his home will not be the same, and, more crucially, nor will he. Unconsciously he suffers from the guilt implicit in the very concept of yerida, a betrayal of the covenant with one's land, one's ancestors, and one's god. He has become a nonperson and return will never restore his integrity.

"Every uprooting is fatal," says Panov. "Everyone who leaves is in the category of survivor. My career ended where it was supposed to start, as soon as I left school, when my country disintegrated, one part of the world collapsed. You have no project. You have to start from scratch. You're less of a filmmaker than someone who's done nothing, never studied but carries a project for three years. Then there's the competition; these people don't respect the rules. I'm on the start line and they're already a hundred meters ahead. You can never catch up. You have an emotional sense of injustice. But then, it's never going to be fair. Every place has its challenges; the ideal space doesn't exist."

The War is Over relies on a framing device set in a Swiss jail from which Rasim recounts his sufferings to a fellow inmate, and the quality of the flashbacks with their searching, broken rhythms, and hazy focus, their uncertain gaze and fractured timeline reflect not just the failing memory of the narrator but also the traumatic amnesia inflicted by events themselves, of which migration has clearly been for him the worst imaginable, inflicting an inner caesura, a spiritual rupture which will not be healed in the simple recounting. His latent trauma can be confronted and released only by a return to the land from which he emigrated and which he believes he betrayed, though this will be no easy task since his children are now Swiss, his marriage is in tatters, and his ancestral land has been sold by his acquisitive brother.

Like the teacher in his film, Panov tried to go home. He spent two years trying to resettle in Macedonia in the Nineties. "I just walked straight back in," he claims, denying any readjustment problems. He gradually had to admit that the extravagant welcome of the prodigal son rarely outlives his return and the fatted calf tastes stale the next day. "People look at you with a fear of new competition, as if you're going to expose their cozy little game—you must think you're better than they are, with all that experience—and they make life five times tougher for you." And he adds with a laugh, "When I'm tempted to say, ‘Hey, these Swiss are giving you a really hard time,' I remind myself, ‘Remember those Macedonians, they treated you really bad.'" The resentment of the returning émigré is amusingly parodied in the frustration of Rasim's materialistic younger brother visiting home from Western Europe. Loaded with gifts for all the family, from whisky to lingerie, the young man feels he is undervalued, mistrusted, and misunderstood, while forgetting that none of his luxury items are appropriate to a culture from which he has simply parted company. His robust displays of independence nearly spark an incident with the local Serb police, demonstrating how the habits and strategies of ethnic conflict fossilize into self-caricature in the diaspora.

Like language, cultural observances also freeze in time at the moment of migration, reduced to extravagant displays of loyalty, such as the cooking of long-abandoned folk dishes now unknown to native cuisine, and film purveying purely mythical renderings of "life at home." Conversely, the robust self-criticism adopted by home communities reflected in films such as Fatmir Koçi's Tirana Year Zero (2001) provoke howls of outrage from the disappointed members of the diaspora, the latest example being the protests of the Australian Slovenian Conference at Jan Cvitkovic's Gravehopping, (see reviews in this issue, 2005) as an insult to national pride "degrading the Slovenian image and Slovenian culture, which is Central European not Balkan." These sentiments are not echoed in Ljubljana or elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia to which Slovenia so recently belonged. This diasporic fatwah indicates how easily the term Balkan can itself be balkanized as an unthinking pejorative and an implement of ethnic rejection, though its current usage in film circles of Southeast Europe points more to its joyous recuperation as an emblem of regional solidarity. Diasporic ignorance of this linguistic mutation only proves how perma-frozen national diasporas can remain.

Panov's teacher has a doubly problematic trajectory in that the Albanians of Serbia are already part of an inner exodus, from which Rasim departs into an international no-man's land. Albanians are to be found in most nations of the Balkans—in Macedonia, Kosovo, and Montenegro, as well as in Albania itself, where a newspaper editor recently took exception to my reference to a regional diaspora with the rejoinder that Albania is simply not large enough for its ethnic population and an extension of its borders was all that was needed to bring the diaspora home. Since Albania has progressively shrunk over the centuries to exclude much of its natural population, the argument might have some merit, though its application to and by other peoples and nations of the Balkans does much to explain the region's conflicts.

Inner diaspora issues aside, Albanian film is experiencing a modest renaissance. Kosovo has seen the revival of veteran director Isa Qosja whose Kukumi (2005), a tale of the unplanned diaspora of lunatics set free in a country taking leave of its senses, won a special award at last year's Sarajevo Film Festival. He is now following up with a story of mad dogs in a similar role. The institutionalization of stray children by the newly empowered postwar communists is the theme of The Great Water (Golemata Voda, 2004), directed by Macedonian Ivo Traikov and based on a novel by Zhivoko Chingo. The film was produced by émigré Albanians associated with Germany's Lara Entertainment. With the help of the same financiers and French coproducers Ciné-Sud Promotion, Fatmir Koçi is now shooting A Lousy Year (Viti i Mbrapshtë) from the novel by Booker Prize winner Ismail Kadare, which tells of the dismantling of pre-1914 Albania, a process that began the current inner diaspora. Gjergj Xhuvani is currently developing The Missionary, which tells of an orphanage during the chaos of the pyramid scheme collapse. This follows his Dear Enemy (I dashur armik, 2004), a film about the Italian, then German occupation of Albania during World War II.

In all these films, dealing as they do with the trauma of the last century of Albanian history, a common theme is the nation as a false asylum, from which any sane member could only wish to escape. This goes some way toward explaining the emergence of a far-flung Albanian diaspora. Many Albanians living in the region clearly couldn't wait to leave it, and with good reason. This account of historical trauma is always laced with the ironies of patriotism betrayed and the pain of roots abandoned, in no case more eloquently than in Kolonel Bunker (1996) and Magic Eye (2005, see reviews of both in this issue), two films by the prolific Kujtim Çashku, Principal of the Marubi Film School in Tirana, where this writer teaches.

Çashku, son of a communist father and an anticommunist mother, launched his directing career with five films made during the regime of the paranoid communist dictator Enver Hoxha, whom he flays in Kolonel Bunker (1996). He emigrated into a period of creative reflection in Romania, then the U.S. and returned to thrive once more under the paranoid capitalist dispensation he dissects in Magic Eye (2005). Speaking of his years abroad, Cashku says, "Ceausescu's Romania pre-1974 was a liberal country for Eastern Europe (similar to Tito's Yugoslavia) at a time when Albania was deep in its repressive alliance with China during Mao's Cultural Revolution. It was in Romania that I had my first contact with Western cinema and literature. My wife and I bought over a thousand books. When the time came to leave, the embassy promised to transport them home. We never saw them again. Eventually the Foreign Office told us these authors were forbidden. This was a terrible pain in our lives."

Almost two decades later, following the Albanian revolution of 1990, during which he founded the Forum of Human Rights in Albania (today the Albanian Helsinki Committee), Çashku spent a year at Columbia University in New York, where he continued to pour all his creative energies into human rights, working with Amnesty International for the release of Albanian political prisoners. "The biggest shock was seeing the Albanian totalitarian system from the outside. The lessons I learned during this time abroad were (1) a new appreciation of the meaning of time, place and space; (2) the priority and power of selection—one can shape one's own trajectory; and (3) that one must never give up, where there's a problem, there's a solution." Çashku made no films during his years of exile, though he insists that the exposure to different film traditions in Romania, France, and the United States had a defining influence on his own style once he returned to Albania, where his career flourished, suggesting that in this region at least the all-important factor may be simply to be there.

While the repeated pattern of yerida and aliya might appear to be fertile for any creative artist, and few Balkan filmmakers have ever entirely severed their roots, one may ask what is gained and what is lost by such a terrible process. The experience of two young Albanian exiles in the United States is distinctly mixed. Actor and stage/film director Avni Abazi refers to the honesty of the American film world compared to the corruption in his homeland, the "even playing field" he encounters at New York auditions. His experiences are truly diasporic, "United States Immigration approved my case under the category ‘Extraordinary ability in filmmaking.'" My intention at age thirty was to continue my career in the United States, where I believed there was a better opportunity for me, but I'm still looking to find the right direction to make my ideas into films. I will continue to work for an Albanian audience, as I did with my New York stage play American Dream Audition, but mainly I will do my best to bring our themes and ideas to the Western and American audience." His compatriot Dhimitri Ismailaj provides further insight into the assimilation process when he refers to "the blending of the background I come from with the new reality of a highly developed technological country, such as the United States." But he acknowledges that he has become "more nostalgic and sensitive about home."

What Albanian emigration means for those left behind is eloquently evoked in Eno Milkani's short filmAbandoned Eden (2004), which captures the loss of an entire generation of young Albanians to economic migration in the wake of the pyramid scheme collapse. The film is set in a mountain village high above the sea in southern Albania deserted by all but its oldest inhabitants, a village unaltered for centuries, without electricity or running water, its whitewashed cottages crumbling into the hillside, and doorsteps sun-baked with the exhaustion of old age. The tiny remnant of those left behind sit in baffled silence, contemplating imminent extinction. Into this stasis the church bell brings news of an advent, the first birth in the village for years, and the old folk come to life in their black dresses and black suits to rush to the scene of the miracle (no couple of childbearing age being anywhere in evidence), to offer the adoration of the magi at this small epiphany. Amidst the ecstatic dancing of aged limbs at the local feast, spinning wheels turn and arthritic hands knit feverishly to protect the messianic life that will rescue them from oblivion, but the church soon rings a death knell for the infant, despatching the blighted village back into its coma of resignation and denial, reminding us that emigration poses the stark choice of "leave or die." Performed without dialog and with dignity by the villagers themselves, wearing their own everyday black clothes, the film achieves a universal, harsh simplicity with which it confronts the cruelty of fate, ascribing no blame, offering no pleas, asking no condolences, and wailing no lament. We cannot know the depth of the suffering of the old villagers, whether they expect to see their loved ones again or have given up hope entirely, but the trauma of bereavement hangs heavy, catalyzed by a brief illusion; the aged Albanians are mocked by the ghosts of their dreams.

The trauma of the former Yugoslavia, by contrast, has created an inner diaspora within a once unitary state now fractured into its not-quite-constituent parts, a diaspora of the soul by which the country has taken leave of it inhabitants, suggesting an unhappy model for diasporas yet unimagined. Panov's comrades have not left home; their home has abandoned them. A once unitary (if federal) state has evicted its citizens into the chilly world of competing nationalisms that define themselves through exclusion and ancient tribal bonding.

A glance at Bosnia's recent output is enough to confirm the traumatic fallout. Days and Hours (Kod amidže Idriza, 2004) written by Namik Kabil and directed by Pjer Žalica, offers an endlessly slow recounting of the moments of bereavement during a simple family visit. Srdjan Vuletić's Summer in the Golden Valley ( Ljeto u zlatnoj dolini, 2003) reveals the harrowing of an entire generation of Sarajevo's youth and its architecture through what seems at first a simple genre piece about a teenage kidnapping and explosive violence. The film was foreshadowed in Ademir Kenović's siege-bound Perfect Circle (Savršeni Krug, 1997), which tells of orphan kids surviving the war with a drunken poet. The unique Nedžad Begović (untamed by this writer as consultant) offered us Totally Personal (Sasvim licno, 2004), an anarchic collage of the Sarajevo soul on home video, the artist unburdening years of siege in dadaist autobiography. Trauma also is the theme ofGrbavica (2006, see review in this issue) by Jasmila Žbanić, winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlinale. And this is just Bosnia-Herzegovina. Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia, and Macedonia all have similar tales to tell.

The singular achievement of the Sarajevo Film Festival (and its director Mirsad Purivatra), founded in the midst of the longest siege in history accompanied by genocidal atrocity, is that it has created a forum in which these historical disasters can be addressed, an asset to Bosnian diplomacy of which the government is fully aware. The Festival's Cinelink script development program run by Sarajevo producer Amra Bakšić Camo brings together practicing filmmakers from across the region to work together on their next project, unitingcinéastes from Bosnia with their counterparts from across the former Yugoslavia in creative reconciliation through the formulation of very hard questions The culminating Cinelink market held during the festival invites producers from across Europe to invest in the results.

Through these initiatives, Sarajevo has made itself the motor of an accelerated process of healing that only the victim can set in motion. Based on its cinematic traditions and a possible common distribution market, filmmakers of this warring region are finding every reason to make common cause. The recently completedBorder Post ( Karaula, 2006, see review in this issue) is an example of pan-Balkan financing and production. Based on the bestselling Croatian novel by Ante Tomić and directed by U.S.-based Croatian director Rajko Grlić, the film was piloted by the leading Bosnian production house Refresh, led by the prolific Ademir Kenović. A coalition of coproducers from each of the former Yugoslav republics including Kosovo was involved, as were producers from France, Austria, and the U.K. Additional financing came from Euroimages, the EU's production fund.

At a Cinelink session in the spring of 2006, Kenović explained that this was a genuine collaboration of likeminded partner companies, each with its creative contribution and invaluable access to separate state funds and ministerial support. He stoutly denied any political or peacemaking agenda in repackaging the former Yugoslavia for the cameras. But he acknowledges that Border Post might serve as an impetus (after the Scandinavian model) for the reconstruction of the Balkan film industry that once thrived under the command economy of the old Yugoslavia. In that regard, the film's audit provides a sobering note of caution. The addition of so many coproducers, each with their own costs, inflated the production budget by between twenty-five to thirty percent, accounting for much of the overspending from the planned 1.8 to the final 2.7 million euros. Although the film topped the charts in each of its contributing Balkan states, costs cannot be recouped fully within the former Yugoslovia market due to the loss of two thirds of the anticipated audience of one million ticket buyers because of intellectual piracy endemic in the region, a chronic shortfall that leaves the producers dependent on international sales to break even.

Kenović is unrepentant, "This was not just a film; it was a special experience. Suddenly the participants were no longer separated by an ice wall. The canyon that had separated them was filled with stepping stones. Creative energies were liberated, enabling a wider choice of cast and crew." He was pleasantly surprised that the anticipated tug of war between competing ministries in the respective capitals was minimized because of an appreciation that this project advocated neither greater closeness nor greater separation. Kenovic believes the main achievement was to show that the former Yugoslavia is capable of looking at the seeds of the conflict, in comedic as well as dramatic form, as it reflects on the situation before and after federal disintegration, and struggles to overcome uneasiness about speaking truth.

The inward diaspora inflicted by the breakup of the former Yugoslavia and its traumatic effect on the psyche of its inhabitants cannot be fully healed by the imaginations of the inspired filmmakers of the region, but their newfound cooperation, aided and abetted by the central role assumed by Sarajevo, will surely play a role in the current, if fragile, détente. Hopefully these films will play a useful part in the cause of peace and reconciliation. Despite (or perhaps because of) the memories of recent war followed by the endemic corruption and criminality encountered in the region, the language of Balkan film is developing with an originality and breadth that international filmmakers will find hard to match.