Želimir Žilnik

While preparing my notes for upcoming meeting with filmmaker colleagues and audiences during my second visit to the OWR festival in Bucharest, in just a few weeks from today, I can’t escape the gloomy notion of the approaching one year mark of the beginning of the horrific war being waged on Ukraine and its courageous people. No right answer to the self-imposed task to define the trajectory of connection between my filmmaking and the civil war that 30 years ago raged in the Balkans, heavily affecting the lives of my fellow countrymen from former Yugoslavia. In the minds of most people war is an occurrence that erupts like natural phenomena – an avalanche, a hurricane or a flood. Powerfully and out of control it breaks, kills, wounds and displaces people. Those who were technically running the war in YU – the military and the paramilitary, were presenting themselves as mere clerks of that war, almost as servants who are listening to the bloody and ruthless tasks of their angry warlords.
Merely five hundred meters from the building I live in, in front of the building of province administration in Novi Sad, thirty something years ago, in the summer of 1988, one of the key delusional shows was organized and orchestrated by the Milošević regime and secret service of Yugoslav state, that was at that time undermined and questioned by the converted leaders of all Yugoslav republics. The same leaders who were - just a few months or a year before - the propagators of proletarian internationalism, multinational equality, self-management and peaceful politics of Yugoslavia. All for the sake of their own survival in power, at the dawn of the fall of Berlin wall, in fear and running away from democratization – they organized post feudal schism of the state, along with the tribalization of population in parts of the country/republics, they reigned.
So, one day, in the summer of 1988, a group of a few thousands “demonstrators” showed up around the white marble building explaining that they are starting an “anti-bureaucratic revolution”. Minutes after watching the people and their slogans and after few conversations with them, it was quite clear to me that it wasn’t a spontaneous gathering, but it was an action coordinated by the state authorities from Belgrade and the secret police, with the help of hundreds of police snoops whose task was to break the legal system and set of values that the former state was based on. Written and shouted slogans were directly spreading hatred towards other nations, demanding dismembering and recomposing the state, denying republic and national consensus that the former state had been based on. Police calmly watched the breaking of the law and cooperated with the demonstrators. About that event, and many similar ones that followed during that summer, for my Bucharest audience I would like to show a documentary footage from the docu-drama “Old timer,” which I have directed, back in 1988.
Three years after the state propaganda machinery had begun working - newspaper and television controlled by the political parties, along with the one-party communist structure working night and day throughout the entire ex-Yugoslavia on planning and creating “multi-party system” – conditions were ripe for the blood to start streaming, to embed the corpses into the foundation of new, now enemy states, emerged from the previous “brotherhood“ republics. 
War was the technical realization of interrepublic power struggle. In the case of Yugoslavia it was actually the continuation – through the means of artillery – of the last, interrupted Convention of the Communist Union of Yugoslavia.
Next video example - from the winter of 1993/94, while the war raved on - is an illustration of the thesis that the population, scared and crazed by the events that landed on their heads, barely can recall the time when the war wasn’t a part of the everyday. Newly established system of values, where robbery, deception and conversion are so common – is being accepted as better alternative to being killed. It is a clip from the film “Tito Among the Serbs for the Second Time.”
For many vicious people, war has a magnetic quality. Not only that the thin line between life and death becomes even thinner, but it is also a roulette where you get rich or lose everything you own – at a cosmic speed. There is no such economy branch, no diamond or gold mine, that could, in a few days or months, create a profit that can be made in war by smuggling, blackmail and robbery. And the technical capacity is so economic: bullet in a barrel and a finger on a trigger. You don’t need a mine, oil platform, a conveyor belt – the amount of treasure that you’ll get is the same as the one that took Rothschild seven generations to gather. Collateral damage however, occurs: population, i.e. people that were promised and told that all the suffering they have to go through is for their own good in fact.
People were promised to be defended from the enemy, that they will regain their dignity and that the medieval greatness and importance of “our ancient state and culture” will be restored. But very soon, those people were out of job, in debts, factories were demolished, children had no future. And the new states were even poorer and smaller than the one that was being torn apart in the name of old greatness. People were slowly coming around, trying to figure out what happened to them. Still afraid to ask: WHO PROFITED FROM ALL THIS? The next clip I’ll show, from the film “Europe Next Door” made in 2005, is exactly about that moment in recent Serbian past.
As years passed by, a new distribution of social wealth was established. On top of every type of profit and economic success is WAR PROFIT, father of all Balkan profits. Together with the helpers – from state, police, and military structures. New class distribution is established as well. 
New power “elites” knew very well that these great achievements should be now defended. Hungry, degraded and angry “losers” – shadow citizens, a vast majority of the population, aren’t completely naive and harmless. What story to sell to them now? The political class in Serbia, under the pressure of the emerging problems, almost unanimously, thinks of a “lifesaving” idea. Russia will help. The biggest country in the world. One of the richest. We shared communism with them in a short period of time, but orthodox religion we shared forever. Russia found another great formula: protect your own richest people. They are simply a part of the government. It even allowed its powerful companies to create military units. Well, that’s a great solution, our “elites” thought! Forget mutiny among the workers, forget the unions, forget Council against corruption, nonsense! One of the candidates for the president of Serbia about 20 years ago, even came up with the additional “imaginative” solution… He suggested that the whole country should formally join to Russia. That was, in “our” situation, “very rational.” Because, it would completely answer the call of tradition and the past, based on the belief that South Slavic people anyway originate from those parts. It seems that Europe, where we live since the 6th century, did not work well for us. But what to me seemed a more realistic background for such devastating concepts, was the elite’s fear of a constant danger that the hungry and resistant citizens will at some point reach for the bat and axe. My last video example (a clip from “The Old School of Capitalism” – a film which re-examines that taboo, made in 2009) is about that.
A year ago, a new devastating war exploded in the heart of Europe, between two territorially biggest European states. We witness media reports and documentaries about 200 to 300 thousand dead, with around a million wounded people and dozens of cities destroyed in Ukraine.
From my high-school days, I remember a book by a Russian writer: “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.”