Documentary project

 

 

 By Maxime Kose

As a conclusion to our virtual field trip to Kosovo, we were given the assignment to create a project in groups that in one way or another raises awareness about Kosovo and that is accessible for people inside as well as outside academics. I formed a group with three of my friends, Emma, Ruïe and Isabel, and we decided to make a short video in documentary style based on interviews conducted with young people who live in Kosovo.

 

We conducted the interviews with six young people from Kosovo over zoom and recorded them. These recordings formed the basis for our documentary. Prior to the editing of the documentary, we decided that we wanted to keep the editing very simple because we wanted our film material to speak for itself. We wanted to prevent that we as ‘filmmakers’ were telling the stories of the young people who participated in our project. Therefore, we chose to only use a voice over at the beginning of the video that introduced the question we wanted to answer, namely, how does the perspective of childhood and parent-child relationships re-contextualize the consequences of the conflict in Kosovo and its future?

 

Our 25-minute documentary called Youthening starts with a series of shots in which the participants in our project introduce their national identity to us and describe what this identity means to them. The middle part of the video consists of a selection of shots in which our participants give their answers to our sub-questions that ultimately lead up to the answer to our main question. In chronological order these sub-questions are: What does family mean to you? Do you talk about the past with your parents? How has your parents’ past influenced their current perspectives? Do you challenge your parents’ perspectives? and What is your hope for the next generation?

 

The answers to this last question, about hope for the next generation, revealed a lot about how young people in Kosovo, or at least the ones we talked to, think about the past and future of Kosovo. Even though all of them acknowledged the importance of remembering the history of Kosovo, they also all revealed an urge to move away from the grudges from the past to a better and peaceful future. The film closes with one of the many meaningful quotes in our movie, namely ,“I hope that whenever my children are in this earth, we will have better relationships with Serbia so that I can say ‘even though we were in a war, we are now friends’”. At this moment the song Blackbirds from the Beatles starts (a reference to the Field of Blackbirds north of Pristina and the very name of Kosovo) and the viewer sees an acknowledgement and a sequence of child photos of our new friends from Kosovo.

 

Working on this project and following the course Peace Lab has made me realize that young people in post-conflict areas, or in Kosovo in this case, are not all that different from young people in the Netherlands, like myself. I am very thankful for the people that took some of their time to help us with our projects and help us understand their situation better. It has been very inspiring to see how they, and all the other people we met during this course, are dealing with what has happened in Kosovo in the past decades.

 

I have learned that conflict recovery takes time and patience, adequate international support and, most importantly, people who are able to look forward and who are brave enough to stand for what they believe in like the people we had the honor of meeting during our virtual trip to Kosovo. There must be a hundred more things I learned from this experience, but I think I will only be fully able to tell what has changed for me in a couple of weeks or even months. I can surely say that this is an experience that I will not soon forget.