Trauma, Memory, and the Politics of Mourning in New Albanian Film from Kosovo

Abstract

A quarter century since the wars of Yugoslav dissolution were ended in 1999 by NATO bombardment, film production observing the wars through a critical lens can still be called quite meager. In the past few years, however, an increasing number of Albanian filmmakers from Kosovo have emerged, exposing the consequences of the war as well as the continuing legacy of strict patriarchal norms and post-war lethal capitalism. In the films discussed in this article – Zana (2019) by Antoneta Kastrati, Hive (2021) by Blerta Basholli, and Three Windows and a Hanging (2014) by Isa Qosja – the suffering of the female protagonists is pitted against the collective trauma and thus coopted by the same nationalist-­capitalist thanatopolitics that created the conditions for the wars, and continues to regulate, restrict and repress survivors’ memory and mourning practices. The films’ female protagonists defy these restrictions, resisting through silent stoicism and ‘agonistic mourning’.

Keywords:

• Kosovo
• film
• war crimes
• trauma
• mourning
• memory
• Yugoslav wars

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.versopolis.com/poet/215/adisa-basic. Accessed January 7, 2023.

2 While some readers may object to my description of NATO bombardment as “criminal,” given that it allegedly brought an end to war crimes in Kosovo, I insist on this designation because collective punishment of a civilian population, and targeting of civilian infrastructure, is a war crime, regardless of that population’s perceived level of support for a criminal regime. Precisely such a collective punishment was inflicted on the civilian population of Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo by NATO forces, resulting not merely in a high number of civilian deaths, but also in the worsening of retaliatory war crimes against Kosovar Albanians by the Serbian forces. For definitions of war crimes provided by the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, see https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/war-crimes.shtml.

3 In the words of the Croatian film director Rajko Grlić, 2024. Interview with Branimira Lazarin. https://www.portalnovosti.com/rajko-grlic-postali-smo-mala-korumpirana-zemlja-iz-koje-ljudi-bjeze.

4 Lazar Stojanović, 2015, “Film as the Voice of Victims.” https://www.recom.link/en/tri-prozora-8/.

5 For example, Enklava [Enclave] by Goran Radovanović (2015), or the more recent psychological thriller, Mrak [Darkling] by Dušan Milić (2022). The statement about their audience is not intended as a judgment of either of these two films, both of which were well received by critics.

6 The large volume of regional coproductions that have been made during the post-war years is deceptive, as these have mainly had lighter content, like comedies, etc. Coproductions having as their subject the 1990s wars, however, have been extremely rare, and generally involved a few prominent actors, who took part in films with strongly political content and received media and public abuse for participating in projects that were seen as going against their collectivity’s “national truth.”.

7 I refer to the recent media controversy surrounding Jasmila Žbanić’s film Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020), a harrowing portrayal of the Srebrenica massacre, and Predrag Antonijević’s Dara from Jasenovac (2020), about child victims of the notorious WWII Croatian death camp (Ivka; Pobjeda). These two films were the official Academy Awards entries for Bosnia and Serbia, respectively. While Aida proved itself on the festival circuit, winning many awards, Dara had a poor critical reception. The problem with Dara. is not the subject of the film itself - in fact, it is my opinion that there are not enough good films about Jasenovac - but the propagandistic haste, poor screenplay, and media trail that accompanied the film. It is basically a “response” to the films about Serbian war crimes committed in the 1990s. Serbian victims from WWII were thus used as a counterweight against civilian victims of more recent Serbian crimes.

8 Compare, by contrast, two international films dealing with the Bosnian war rapes: As If I Am Not There, by Juanita Wilson (2011), who opted for graphic rape scenes to represent the trauma, and In The Land Of Blood And Honey, by Angelina Jolie (2011), who tried, in blithe Hollywood fashion, to didactically explain the causes of the war and fit in an impossible love story, to boot.

9 Deleuze says, “Resnais and the Straubs are probably the greatest political film-makers in the West in modern cinema. But, oddly, this is not through the presence of the people. On the contrary, it is because they know how to show how the people are what is missing, what is not there.” […] “if there were a modern political cinema, it would be on this basis: the people no longer exist, or not yet…” (215–217).

10 A Bosnian mother, who in Jasmila Žbanić’s documentary short, Red Rubber Boots (2000), searches for her two children, one only 9 months old, taken from her by Serbs in 1992 and buried in different mass graves, experiences similar traumatic leakages. Whenever she dreams of her children, she actually dreams only of her thwarted efforts at finding them: “It is very rare that I see them in my dreams… . I would like to see my children, to talk to them, but they don’t come to my dreams. […] for me the dreams are horrible, since I’m looking for my children and I can never find them.” [Trans. auth.].

11 I refer to Serge Daney’s argument, which has been infinitely requoted, about Pontecorvo’s tracking shot in the 1960 film Kapo.

12 Ellen Elias-Bursać’s book, Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at a War Crimes Tribunal: Working in a Tug-of-War (Palgrave, 2015), documenting the translation operations at the Hague Tribunal, demonstrates the complexity of legal proceedings at an international court of law.