Elections and Cinema

Well, the Serbian elections went off pretty much without a bang, despite me listening intently for the sound of gunshots or riots in the street as I sat watching the results unfurl on the television.

Nikolic, the Radical Party candidate, won resoundingly, although that doesn't necessarily mean that he will win on February 3rd, when the top two candidates have a run-off to see who will be President. Tadic, the second candidate and current President, is doing his best at the moment to present his opponent as an ultra nationalist crazy (well, its pretty much true) who will take Serbia back to the bad old days of war, sanctions and international pariah status.

While this may be fair enough, Tadic himself is insisting that Kosovo will not be allowed to separate from Serbia, and denying (despite much evidence to the contrary) that the EU he is so desperate to join will have any problem with this. We'll see. The President is largely a figurehead anyway, but in the unstable way of Balkans politics this could easily be changed if a strong enough President came into the position. Milosevic switched between Prime Minister and President a number of times during his career, just ensuring that whichever position he held at the time was the one with the power.

It won't do Serbia any good to have Radical Nikolic as President, if he wins on February 3. But then maybe it would certain NATO countries stand up and realise that imposing sanctions on a country so that people reach near starvation point, bombing them, and now preventing them from travelling abroad (Serbs face queues of 8 hours if they want a visa to go to Germany, and are often then refused it) does not a West-loving country make.

In between the times I've been watching Serbian news re the election I've been going to see Serbian language films. This unfortunately does not mean my Serbian has improved, just that I'm developing a lot of patience and becoming good at reading Balkan facial expressions. When I say Serbian films, I mean specifically one, which I went to see the other night with James and his friend Vladimir, a Serbian who grew up in Zimbabwe and is now doing his PhD at LSE, and thus made a very good interpretor for when I really just wanted to know what the hell was going on in the move.

It was called 'Belle Epoque, or the Last Waltz of Sarajevo' and I recommend it to everyone, and really hope that it gets release in the West. The movie was actually made in 1990, and was in post-production when the war began and thus ended up collecting dust in a basement somewhere where it thankfully survived the bombings. It has only just been released, and has had some showings at international festivals in Europe, but hopefully it will get beyond the arthouse circuit so people will actually see it.

The nexus around which the story turns is the assasination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, told through the eyes of a young aspiring filmmaker whose loyalties are torn between his mother, who has cuddled up to the Austro-Hungarian regime, and the girl he loves who is an underground revolutionary working for the terrorist group 'Mlada Bosna'. One thing I was interested to find out through the film was that Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of Franz Ferdinand, actually worked for the Sarajevo based Mlada Bosna, a socialist-leaning group fighting for Bosnian independence, and not the Greater Serb nationalists the Black Hand. I don't know about anyone else, but I was always taught in school it was the Black Hand who killed F-F, not a socialist leaning Bosnian independence group. The lies they tell us! (This reminds me of a quote of Gloria Steinham's I heard yesterday - The truth will set you free but first it will piss you off. Not that Steinham is usually my favourite person to quote, but here I totally agree).

Anyway, the film was actually very moving, and did a good job of showing the tangled web of allegiances that was early twentieth century Sarajevo. The director made a somewhat heavy-handed statement at the beginning about how you need to understand the violent way in which Sarajevo began the twentieth century to udnerstand the violent way it ended it (I don't buy pointless attempts at historical symmetry) but apart from this the film was relatively free of reductionism or didacticism. If it comes out with English subtitles, I want someone to tell me, because if I could understand the dialogue it would mean even more...