Mirjana Jokovic in "The Powder Keg," a film about life in Belgrade pre-NATO strikes

June 14, 1999
Web posted at: 4:39 p.m. EDT (2039 GMT)

From Cynthia Tornquist
CNN Entertainment News Correspondent

NEW YORK (CNN) -- As peacekeeping forces move into Yugoslavia's Serbian province of Kosovo, two films illustrating the toll of war on the larger region are being presented in New York.

"Cabaret Balkan" is Belgrade-born director Goran Paskaljevic's disturbing feature about life in the Yugoslav capital before the NATO air strikes. Set in the Cabaret Balkan on the eve of the 1995 Dayton peace accord for Bosnia-Herzegovina, the film was shot entirely at night -- to reflect, says the filmmaker, the darkness that has fallen upon his country.

The film won the FIPRESCI International Critics' prize at the 1998 Venice Film Festival, and is the centerpiece of the ongoing Human Rights Watch International Film Festival in New York.

Paskaljevic says the story focuses on the events fueling ethnic hostility in the former Yugoslavia. The images in the film are stark, as is everyday life for people trapped in a world full of moral ambiguity.

Among them: A young couple in mid-quarrel who rediscover their love for each other when they're taken hostage by local mobsters. And two lifelong friends reveal a lifetime of betrayals when one reveals that he put gasoline in his friend's gas tank.

"After the embargo, we lost the middle class, the mafia grew up, the violence grew up in society, horrible poverty," Paskaljevic says. "And in these circumstances, we have tensions. We became, everybody of us there, like a powder keg ready to explode."

One of the film's stars, actress Mirjana Jokovic, is from Belgrade. "I think it's very good this film is showing now. War became too impersonalized, (as if) it's a scientific project, and this is a reminder that there are living people there," she says.

"Crime and Punishment" is a harsh look at the carnage handed out by Serbian troops in Bosnia

As dark as "Cabaret Balkan" is, the documentary "Crime and Punishment," by Norwegian filmmaker Maria Fuglevaag Warsinski, is grimmer still. In one scene, a Bosnian man searches for his father by turning over the bodies of the dead. "I turned over 300 dead people," the man tells his audience.

He and others tell of escaping death at the hands of Serbian soldiers during the destruction of Srebrenica, alleged to be the site of the biggest mass killings in Europe since World War II.

"You can't believe it, still three years later, dead bodies are lying around the ground in the fields," Warsinski says. "You have more than 8,000 people still missing."

This graphic film, with footage of some of the men many survivors say orchestrated the massacre, has been shown to the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.

"The same people who did the massacres in Srebrenica, they are also in Kosovo today," Warsinski says.

While different in their approach, together "Crime and Punishment" and "Cabaret Balkan" offer insight into the crisis in the Balkans.

The 10th Human Rights Watch International Film Festival runs through June 24 at Lincoln Center in New York. For ticket information, call 212-777-3456.