Bosnia Film on Coexistence Wins Plaudits

The film, titled The Village the War Forgot, was screened at the conference Picturing Moral Courage: Stories of Survival, held in the Bosnian capital on July 15 and 16. It was shown to the audience of movie directors and some 120 students from all over the world, including Rwanda, China, The United States and the region. The conference was organised by the Post-Conflict Research Centre, the United States embassy in Sarajevo and PROOF: Media for Social Justice.

IWPR's documentary was shown at the panel Media and Social Change, at which documentaries were presented featuring people who rescued members of other ethnic groups, often risking their own lives in the process.

The Village the War Forgot is a story about the village of Baljvine in the Bosnian Serb entity Republika Srpska, RS. This is the only village in Bosnia in which Bosniaks and Serbs never came to blows. During the Second World War and the more recent Bosnian war, they protected each other from invaders and preserved their community.

The mosque in Baljvine is the only one in RS which wasn’t destroyed or heavily damaged during the 1992-95 war.

The villagers proudly say that Bosnia would be a much happier country if everyone followed their example and respected and cherished their neighbours regardless of their ethnicity.

Luka Idzakovic, a teenager from the central Bosnian town of Vares who also took part in the conference in Sarajevo, said he was “incredibly inspired” by IWPR's documentary on Baljvine.

“It gave me so much hope. I never could have imagined that a place like that existed in Bosnia,” he said. “It is important to show to the Bosnian public documentaries depicting positive examples of inter-ethnic coexistence, because that can greatly help the process of reconciliation in this country.”

Tatjana Milovanovic, a student from the northern Bosnian town of Brcko, said she was thrilled to see that people in Baljvine managed to overcome all divisions that plague the rest of the country.

“It was wonderful to see that there is a place in Bosnia that rises above all the inter-ethnic hatred which tore this country apart in the Nineties. People in Baljvine have proved that we can live together, despite all the terrible things that happened to us in the past. They are the best example for all of us,” she said.

Luka Idzakovic, a teenager from the central Bosnian town of Vares who also took part in the conference in Sarajevo, said he was “incredibly inspired” by IWPR's documentary on Baljvine.
“It gave me so much hope. I never could have imagined that a place like that existed in Bosnia,” he said. “It is important to show to the Bosnian public documentaries depicting positive examples of inter-ethnic coexistence, because that can greatly help the process of reconciliation in this country.”

This film was made in July last year as part of IWPR’s series of short documentaries on refugees who had gone back to the homes they were forced to flee during the war. The films revealed their everyday problems, but also their belief in coexistence between Bosnia’s various ethnic groups (See: Tales of Transition).

The documentaries were produced by IWPR and Sarajevo-based production company Mebius Film and broadcast on the state television BHT 1 and 30 local TV stations throughout Bosnia.

In March this year, these short documentaries were shown in Belgrade to a group of 40 high school children from all over Serbia who took part in the School on Human Rights for Youth, run by the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, HCHR.

The Village the War Forgot documentary came about as a result of an article by IWPR’s reporter Marija Arnautovic on Baljvine, published in April last year (Bosnia: The Village Where Hate Never Triumphed). She too was present at the screening of the film in Sarajevo on July 15 and described to the audience her own impressions of the village.

“Such stories make a reporter's job worthwhile. The fact that Serbs and Bosniaks in this remarkable village lived together through the whole war and helped each other despite all the risks proved that moral courage can prevail even in the worst of times,” Arnautovic said.

She added that she had been to the village four times and was every time equally fascinated by the positive energy of its inhabitants and their determination to live together and get on with their lives, despite all the hardships and the fact that Bosnia is still a country deeply divided along the ethnic lines.

After the screening, two other filmmakers who were at the same panel with Arnautovic, Bosnian Ahmed Imamovic and Italian Mirko Pincelli, congratulated IWPR on the film, saying that documentaries like this one - promoting tolerance and good neighbourly relations even in the most difficult times - can greatly contribute to the overall positive atmosphere and peace-building in Bosnia.

Moderator of the panel, Stephen Smith, who is executive Director of the Shoah Foundation and Founder of the Aegis Trust, noted, “We often hear extraordinary stories of terror or heroism. But this ordinary village in Bosnia was extraordinary in the sense that there were no victims, no perpetrators of crimes, or bystanders. People were just people; they simply went on with their normal lives even when the world went mad around them.”

“The message of this documentary is simple, but powerful: if you don't hurt your neighbour, no-one will get hurt.”