Picture Me an Enemy

Reflections on the film “Picture Me an Enemy”

http://www.visavisproductions.com/

Film synopsis (from the above website):

When the war started, we thought it was simply impossible.
What, am I supposed to expect my first neighbor to come and kill me?
Oh, come on it's not possible! But it is very possible and it happened.
Tahija Vikalo (1998)

In 1991, war broke out in the former Yugoslavia. The ensuing conflicts left up to a quarter of a million people dead or missing in the region and made refugees of more than half of the national population of Bosnia & Herzegovina. And despite wide international attention, understanding of these conflicts is still vague and detached. Told through the intimate stories of Natasa, a Serbo-Croat from Croatia, and Tahija, a Bosniak (a Bosnian Muslim), Picture Me an Enemy puts a human face on these distant conflicts. Although pictured to one another, and to the world, as longtime enemies, Natasa and Tahija speak a common truth about how those in power used religion, ethnicity and nationality to construct the "enemy" during the conflicts. It is a moving portrait of two young women who reach beyond their national identities to address universal questions of conflict, peace and forgiveness with sensitivity and unexpected humor. Tahija Vikalo was just beginning college when the war erupted in Bosnia & Herzegovina. She lived through the worst of the war in Sarajevo, running past snipers on her way home from work. In the summer of 1998, the Picture Me an Enemy crew traveled with Tahija back to her home in Sarajevo. Tracing Tahija's footsteps through the past and into the present, we gain a unique view of Bosnian life and culture as well as the horror she went through. Tahija's introduction to Bosnia challenges stereotypes about her country and the Muslim religion. And her firsthand experience of war is a window into the brutality and suffering that results from such conflicts.

Natasa Borcanin, originally from Osijek, Croatia, was a high school student when war erupted in Croatia. In formal interviews and intimate settings, Natasa discusses her experience of war breaking out in her country and then what it was like to watch these conflicts unfold on television from the US where she was an exchange student. As a Croat with mixed ethnicity (her father is Serbian and her mother is Croatian), Natasa represents the innate complexity of these wars. She and her family suffered as victims of discrimination in her Croatian hometown and yet for Natasa, the war was "not a war of our generation...we never knew of these hatreds between ethnic groups." Natasa provides a unique perspective on the complexities of personal identity and the danger of assigning people to rigid ethnic groups.

With candid and revealing perspectives rarely seen on the evening news, Tahija and Natasa provide new insights into these, often-misunderstood, conflicts. And although the documentary focuses on the conflicts of the former Yugoslavia, the themes raised within, reach far beyond the borders of any one country.

Shot in Philadelphia and the former Yugoslavia, Picture Me an Enemy inter-cuts archival news footage and abstract Super 8 vignettes with the post-war reflections of Tahija and Natasa in a style that is both engaging and sincere. This is supplemented with archival footage from the war and a wealth of images of the people and places of the former Yugoslavia. Award-winning editor Barbara Burst combines these elements in an engaging and sincere way. Blending sounds from East, West, folk and pop, the film's soundtrack features the music of diaSonic, an international act recently featured on MTV and Fox Television. The musicians, Milan Kovacev and Damir Prcic, who, like Tahija and Natasa, come from opposing sides of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, find a common ground through music by combining classical, hip hop and electronic dance music with folk songs from Serbia and Bosnia.

This documentary is especially unique because of the visibly sincere friendship developed over six years between the vis à vis productions crew and Tahija & Natasa. As they share their experiences, the viewer is introduced to the images, humor, culture and life of the former Yugoslavia in an up close and intimate way.

The target audience for Picture Me an Enemy is people who care little about issues of war and conflict, and would rarely ever sit down to watch a "war documentary." Although told through the voices of two women from the former Yugoslavia, the themes raised throughout Picture Me an Enemy reach far beyond the borders of any one country. At its core, this is a story of two women who have the same fears, hopes and dreams as women anywhere.

This film was screened as part of a Bosnia symposium at my college, and was also part of the curriculum for a freshman course on the Bosnian war for which I was a TA. I thought this was an excellent film that exemplified the complicated, category-defying classification of ethnic groups in Bosnia. After traveling to Bosnia four times and contemplating the complex role ethnicity played in the war, the only thing I am completely sure of is that nothing is certain. The Bosnian conflict is so difficult, so intriguing, and so important because it was not a clear-cut matter of black and white/good guys vs. bad guys. Rather, it seems that every side is a shade of gray, and I can’t unqualifiedly label any one group as the “good guys.”

Moreover, it seems that each person you ask lays the blame for what happened elsewhere. For example, when I was in Mostar in 2004, our Bosnian Muslim trip hostess told us that during the war, the Croats and Muslims of Mostar had banded together against the Serb aggressors. When the Serbs were no longer a threat, she said, the Croats turned on the Muslims with no reason and started shooting at them.

That summer, I was speaking to an American man who does mission work in Bosnia through a Catholic relief organization and works primarily with Bosnian Croats. When I mentioned Mostar, he told me that he had heard how the Croats and Muslims banded together against the Serbs until the Muslims irrationally turned on the Croats and started shooting. It’s hard to know what the truth of the matter actually is.

The thing that struck me most about the video was when Tahija commented that people are always saying to her “No! You’re Muslim? You can’t be Muslim!” Most of the interpreters we work with in Bosnia are Muslim, and I have to admit that before I met them, the concept of a blonde, liberal European Muslim girl who speaks English, wants to live in America, dresses like me, and knows more about American pop culture than I do was a little startling. Many Americans tend to at best see all Muslims as Middle-Eastern/Arab and traditional, and at worst see all Muslims as terrorists or Islamist extremists. In the girl in the video, I not only saw my friends from Sarajevo, I saw my girlfriends in New Jersey.

A film like this makes it apparent that there were ordinary people on every side, girls my age who dress like me and think like me and aren’t irrational or full of hate. Most of the people swept up by the conflict were simply ordinary people. It must be very hard for Bosnians like the two girls in the video not to fall into the trap of thinking of each other in such unambiguous right and wrong/good and evil terms.

Reflections on Pretty Birds by Scott Simon

Reflections on Pretty Birds by Scott Simon
Random House, 2005

a good review of the book can be found here:
http://www.mostlyfiction.com/world/simon.htm

"There is no greater sorrow on earth than the loss of one's native land." -- Euripides

I first read this book over the summer of 2007 (I actually finished it while I was in Bosnia), and I absolutely loved it. Not only is it a powerful, fascinating story with compelling characters, but it also provides an interesting and accurate snapshot of what life was like in besieged Sarajevo. Sarajevo is a city I love and feel very close to, and I could visualize many of the places and people with whom Irena interacted.

What I liked best about the book was how it shattered my preconceived notions. To begin, I was startled when I first heard that the book was about a sniper who was a Muslim female – I had assumed that the snipers involved in the siege of Sarajevo were male and Serb, paramilitary units or members of the JNA. I didn’t think about the possibility of snipers on the other side, and if I had, I would have assumed they were soldiers in the Bosnian army and probably male. Irena challenged my concept of gender roles. Given that Slavenka Drakulić consistently affirms that Bosnia is a very patriarchal society, I thought it especially interesting that, according to Scott Simon, it was not uncommon to use girls as snipers. Though Irena is much tougher and sharper than I am, I can relate to her as a young woman, and I can see aspects of my girlfriends in her.

It was fascinating to find myself empathizing with the sniper rather than with the victim. When the novel opened, I was horrified to read about the blasé, casual way Irena went about shooting people as if it were any ordinary part-time job. I recoiled from the way she systematically decided how to line up her target, and justified shooting at the lemon stand because the people there could afford the luxury of buying lemons.

As I read the novel, however, I grew to understand Irena, to sympathize and even empathize with her, to understand her actions and realize why she chose to fight back. As I came to care about Irena, I came to realize how important survival was for her, and how becoming a sniper was her way of surviving. It’s very difficult for me to imagine myself in the shoes of someone who deliberately picks a human target to kill, but I was almost able to do so through the character of Irena.

I was very intrigued by the Knight, the Bosnian Serb radio propagandist who reads the “news” every day and spouts threats and racial epithets against the Muslims. If besieged Sarajevans want to hear music or get any sort of updates, they have to listen to the Knight and are forced to hear him mock and threaten them. First, I wonder about the accuracy of Simon’s description of the Knight. I know propaganda was a major political weapon during the Bosnian war, but Pretty Birds is the first source in which I’ve found a description of propaganda being played systematically over the speaker systems in Sarajevo. I’ve heard that Simon’s novel is well researched, accurate, and largely based on personal experience, so I assume the Knight is in some way based on a real person.

It makes me question how people responded to the Knight’s talk. Irena ignores his blather for the most part, though she grumbles that she has to listen to so much nonsense before getting to the music. Were they all able to ignore the Knight as successfully as Irena was? When someone says something offensive about you, a natural instinct is to become angry with the speaker and fight back against the accusations. But what if you are hearing the talk every day and there is no way to fight it? Do you start to believe that the negative things said about you are true? What does this do to your sense of humanity and of self-worth?

Furthermore, how did Serbs living in Sarajevo respond to the negative propaganda about the Muslims? In such a cosmopolitan and ethnically mixed city, it was unlikely that there were Serbs who knew no Muslims and could be genuinely deluded because of ignorance. Did non-Muslims believe what the Knight said? I think it’s hard to know, because it’s very conceivable that even the best-intentioned people may fall for propaganda because they don’t realize what it is. Such considerations make me very careful of the news I read and see, for I realize that I tend not to question what my usual sources (CNN and the BBC) tell me. I hope that I would be reasonable enough to realize if the media is presenting me with something inaccurate or deliberately misleading, but for all I know, I’ve been exposed to propaganda before and not even recognized it.

Another aspect I found interesting was Mrs. Zarić’s reaction to her daughter’s rape by the soldiers who forced them out of their home in Grbavica. She is furious, and rightly so. She wishes to respond to violence with violence, and wants revenge for the wrongs committed against her and her family. Mrs. Zarić does not consider for even one moment forgiveness or reconciliation of any kind, and I fully understand her action. Throughout Pretty Birds, I found myself trying to put myself in the characters’ places and wondering what I would do in their situations. If I had a daughter who was raped, how would I respond? How could I feel anything but anger, anger that I would pass on to my children and use to perpetuate the cycle of violence?

Simon makes extensive use of animals as literal innocent victims of war: the animals in the Sarajevo zoo starve to death, the dogs at Dr. Pekar’s clinic are dying, Pretty Bird is starving and the Zarić family is forced to let her go. At the same time, the animals can be seen as a metaphor for all of war’s innocent victims. Just as with people, some animals die, some (such as Pretty Bird) survive but are forced to relocate, and none has committed any crime or in any way deserves to be persecuted. On a somewhat ironic level, this can be read as a literary convention used to make people sympathize with and feel emotionally connected to the citizens of Sarajevo. For some reason, humans sometimes sympathize more with animal than with human victims, perhaps because we believe that animals are incapable of acting rationally and thus incapable of evil and never deserving of punishment or hurt. People can watch a disaster movie where a city is leveled and thousands of people die, but the family dog has to survive or moviegoers will be very upset. Pretty Birds may, to some extent, be playing on the same idea.