Film Balkan
Noah Casanova
We recently sat down with filmmaker Mary Zournazi to discuss her new film My Rembetika Blues. Rembetika music, or the Greek blues, is a music born of exile and the streets, developing its roots from the mass migration of people in the early twentieth century.
The Bikepacking Journal is our biannual printed publication. Each issue features a collection of inspiring writing and beautiful photography. Find details on the three most recent issues below, join the Bikepacking Collective to get it in the mail (anywhere in the world), or click here to find a collection of selected stories in digital format.
Four years after the trip captured in Ice & Palms, Jochen and Max were itching to get out for another journey together. As passionate about cycling and skiing as ever, they decided to combine the two once more for their latest unique escapade. Looking at a map of Europe with places they could reach by train in mind, the Western Balkans stood out as the obvious destination for a reunion tour. They would plan to catch a train from Germany down to Greece and cycle and ski some 2,500 kilometers (1,550 miles) back home from there, ultimately packing in around 40,000 meters (131,000 feet) of climbing.
Max and Jochen planned their route on the fly, with only the starting point of Thessaloniki and the final stop of Munich set in stone. They picked a mountain range to pedal up and ski down in each country in between and used those as rough waypoints to guide them north. What transpired in between was mostly improvised, and their planning scale was typically measured from one coffee break or meal to the next rather than adhering to a broader fixed route.
Philipp and his filmmaking team joined Jochen and Max for the first couple of weeks and the final few days of their ride, but they were on their own to document the parts of the trip in between. Combined with the strenuous mountain riding and skiing, they say the demands of capturing the ride amid the logistical challenges of keeping the trip on schedule were another big challenge. For most of us, the riding and skiing alone would be more than enough to take on, and Jochen and Max also had to manage keeping cameras charged, setting up shots, and hauling all of the equipment needed to make the film possible. Lucky for viewers, as evidenced in the film, they were up to the challenge again.
BIKEPACKING.com is dedicated to exploration by bicycle. We inspire and inform through original bikepacking routes, stories, and coverage of the gear, news, and events that make our community thrive. We believe travel by bicycle has the power to encourage conservation, inclusivity, and respect for all people and cultures. More here.
The film was released in Russia on 21 March 2019 (three days prior to the 20th anniversary of the events depicted in the film); it was released by 20th Century Fox CIS) after the acquisition of 21st Century Fox by Disney.
In 1999, during the bombing of Yugoslavia and the Kosovo War, Slatina airfield is taken over by a UK battalion led by an Albanian warlord, Smuk. Afterwards, an operation to capture the airfield from them is conducted by GRU agents. The separatists engage in organ harvesting, robberies, assassinations, and ethnic cleansing.
GRU officer Aslan-Bek Evkhoev and former paratrooper-turned-mercenary Andrey Shatalov head a small detachment tasked with the dangerous mission to stop the Albanians, recapture the airfield held from them, and hold it until Russian Airborne Troops reinforcements stationed in Bosnia arrive ahead of NATO forces, which the team will leave beforehand, as well as rescue Shatalov's love interest Jasna Blagojević, who was captured to be harvested for organs, along with several ethnic Serb prisoners.[5]
The idea of creating a film about the events in Yugoslavia came to Gosha Kutsenko in 2012, during a conversation with a friend, Slovak producer Vasil Shevts. The writer Ivan Naumov was invited to write the script, and he created a 600-page love story of a Russian peacekeeper and a Serbian girl. Kutsenko later met with producer Vadim Byrkin and General Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, who agreed to help him. The real details of the operation in which Yevkurov participated (at that time - the GRU special forces major) are still under the stamp of secrecy, so the scriptwriters thought up the plot at their own discretion, and Yevkurov advised them on the reliability of what was happening.[9]
Miloš Biković was first offered the role of a Russian soldier, but he refused, deciding that it would be more logical for him to play a Serb in a joint film between Russia and Serbia. However, he immediately agreed to help organize the filming in his homeland and became not only an actor, but also one of the producers of the film.
Emir Kusturica played a small role as a Belgrade taxi driver; According to executive producer Anastasia Pelevina, at first the director had to enter the crew from the Serbian side, but their work schedules did not match.
For the filming, all the actors playing the role of special forces went through heavy two-month training which focused on shooting and physical conditioning. Location filming took place in Moscow, the Moscow Oblast, the Republic of Crimea, Russia, and Serbia.
The film is hilariously funny, even for people who know nothing about Yugoslavia. But on a deeper level, there is so much more: a story about a former Stalinist who went to prison himself is now trying to save the nation, the wife who initially thinks that her husband has gone crazy but becomes supportive as she realizes that his life found a meaning again, surprisingly open criticism of corruption, inflation, bureaucracy and economic hardship in socialist Yugoslavia, the paranoia or suspicion about anything foreign, the tension between old-school socialists and free-market entrepreneurs, and how for someone believing in a conspiracy, all facts and non-facts only support his theory. Not only the latter point is still topical at times, and not only in the Balkans.
A Russian film company is revisiting Moscow's history of involvement in the Balkan conflicts two decades ago as the Kremlin works to solidify and expand its influence and blunt Serbia's Western aspirations.
Upgrade Vision film is ramping up final production for the 2019 release of what it calls a "heroic drama" titled The Balkan Line. It's a fictionalized account of a June 1999 standoff between a small contingent of Russian forces and their NATO counterparts at the Slatina air base at Pristina Airport in Kosovo.
Support for Russian politics is growing in Serbian society, while some Serbs in the public sector have become the "bearers of the Russian idea" and aid in supporting positive perceptions of Russia's military, according to analyst Aleksandar Radic.
Longtime Russian ally Serbia has become a major target of the Kremlin's anti-Western operations in Europe. With Belgrade eyeing European Union membership, Moscow has played up their shared eastern Orthodox Christianity and deep cultural and historical ties.
In March, nearly two dozen members of the Russian nationalist motorcycle group Night Wolves visited Banja Luka, the administrative center of Bosnia's predominantly Serb entity, Republika Srpska, as part of what they called a "Russian Balkans" tour.
In June 1999, about 200 Russian soldiers entered Kosovo from Bosnia and seized the airport. Moscow was said to have been unhappy over not being given a leadership role in supervising any of the regions that Kosovo had been divided into.
After several hours, the standoff ended with the Russians and Serbs being given control of the northern part of the former Yugoslavia's most sophisticated airports, while British troops manned the southern end.
One of the authors of the film, who asked to not be identified because of the sensitive nature of the topic, told RFE/RL that, in the screenplay, "the emphasis is placed on the fact that Serbia is a strongly impacted party in the conflict."
"Historians consider these events as the worst deterioration of relations between Russia and the West since the time of the Cuban missile crisis, " the Russian Culture Ministry said in a statement, though it did not confirm its support role for the film. "The Balkan Line talks about the operation, whose details are still not known to the public to this day."
Meanwhile, the Myrotvorets website, which reveals personal details of people it considers "enemies of Ukraine," has published the names of Serbs who were involved in the project, accusing them of participating in propaganda activities and the institutionalization of Russia's Crimean annexation.
If you are in Russia or the Russia-controlled parts of Ukraine and hold a Russian passport or are a stateless person residing permanently in Russia or the Russia-controlled parts of Ukraine, please note that you could face fines or imprisonment for sharing, liking, commenting on, or saving our content, or for contacting us.
The history of the war reads like a scene from hell, the unfathomable brutality made all the more grotesque by the fact that it happened in Europe, in modern times, and literally in front of the eyes of the international community. The systematic rape of women was so heinous that for the first time in international court history, the coordinated use of rape as a weapon of war was declared a crime against humanity, second only to genocide.
As If I Am Not There, however, is not a documentary: it is a work of fiction that is based on the accounts of the victims. Thus, it is not meant to be a compendium of atrocities or a chronology of events. Yet considering how well-documented by journalists the entire war was, one would expect that history somehow inform the film, the gravitas of what happened, and the real stories of the women should underpin the movie.
During World War 2 the National Film Board was actively involved in producing films that would provide a uniquely Canadian view of the war effort at home and on the fighting fronts. Two theatrical newsreel series were produced during this time: Canada Carries On, which focused on Canadian stories, and The World in Action, which had a more international outlook.
c80f0f1006