Month: July 2016

I’m sitting here trying to get myself to finally cut this audio and start to stitch it together. But the later it gets, and the closer I get to the next day, the more my nerves tighten.

Weeks ago, I found this article that briefly touched on the lives of a number of families who were living in an abandoned prison in Istog, Kosovo. The old Dubrava Prison. This struck me, and seemed to be the sort of social issues story I’d really want to work on. I had one goal this whole trip, and it was to make this story come to fruition. Weeks went by where I hadn’t thought I was making any progress, and there were times were it looked like things were falling through. I was fairly ready to give it up, and move on to plan B. However, there were lingering questions that I had to have answered before I gave it up. So I kept going on with it.

Now here I am a day after I had been there, and I have seen the families living there. And I will be very honest: I don’t know why I thought this story would be easy, and I don’t mean easy getting there, making contacts, and all the normal journalistic work. Rather, I mean, why did I not expect that I might see something there that would really strike me with fear, and a form of sorrow?

I spoke with my mom tonight, and I tried to hold what I saw back. I didn’t want her to be scared for me, (She wasn’t. She trusts God too much to worry), but I knew I needed to talk it out so that I could be ready to go back. She asked me; “What is your motive in going there?”. I have to be frank; I’ve been asking myself that same question. I would never want to be so shallow as to enter these people’s lives, and record their poverty just so I could have a good story for my portfolio. If that is my motive, then sorry Meredith, I don’t think I am going to finish this. But I know that’s not the reason.

I’m still searching for my purpose in this project. I won’t pretend to know exactly what got me here, but I’m here, and I’m going to do the work. Hopefully I will find the reason why I came. I just feel like I have nothing to offer these people. Sure, I can bring them some fruit, and maybe print them some family photos, but they’ll eat once, and be hungry again. They might have a photo to cherish for a moment, but who’s to say the elements won’t seep through the ceiling, walls, come up through the floor, and destroy the images.

The image below is what really has stricken me. And I don’t really have much to say about it. At this point, I’m just as confused, disgusted, and sorry as you might be.

So, I’m here preparing to go back. Spend two full days with the family. I asked my mom to pray. She will be sending some bible verses in the morning.

“Skopje was not [a] beautiful town…but it was [an] authentic town.”

These words expressed by Zaneta Trajkoska, The Director of the Institute for Media in Macedonia, describe a general feeling that Macedonians have towards the newly built structures that stand tall in the city center of Skopje, Macedonia.

A statue of Alexander the Great, complete with a water fountain, overlooks the city. A closer look at the statue reveals something that wasn’t in the original plan for the statue; splashed of red paint . Citizens in protest launch paint balls at the government funded statues as well as at a select number of government buildings.

In what has become known as the Colorful Revolution, the people of Macedonia are displaying their anger towards the government in an artistic way. What started as a protest over leaked conversations secretly recorded by the government has come to represent a variety of problems facing their society. One of the bigger issues is trying to create fair elections and hold those who took part in governmental scandal accountable under the law.

These statues endure the brunt of the anger because they represent the government failing to act in the interest of its people. the citizens were shown a digital version of what the city would look like after the building, but were angry as they felt the statues were unnecessary and overly expensive. Without consent of the people, the government began building. Now, the people stand in solidarity to show that they have a voice that needs to be heard.

“It is not about that they are improving the quality of living, but they are just putting on ugly makeup,” said Trajkoska. “It’s completely ugly.”

 

Last Sunday a friend of mine from Morocco and I went to Janjeva, a little village approximately 20 km away from the district of Prishtina.  A friend of us, who lives there invited us to visit Janjeva. Interesting about Janjeva is that there live 4 different ethnicity groups  all together in that little old village; Albanians, Croatians, Serbs, and the Ashkali. The whole village was kind of separated in districts, there were parts of the village where only Albanians would live and other parts where Croatians live and so on. However, they would all meet in the “center” which had many little caffees, a little bakery and the Mosque and the Church. They all live peacefully together – I liked that.

Our friend showed us around. The houses in the village were old and small.

The highlight of this trip was Gaga.

Gaga is an old Croatian Lady who always lived in Janjeva. She allowed us to visit her in her own House, in which she had a beautiful Garden. Gaga told us about her life as a Croatian in Kosovo. She had a big family, but her children left Kosovo and went to Croatia. Today she lives with only one of her daughters in her beautiful House in Janjeva.

I enjoyed that Sunday a lot. 🙂

 

– Besiana Kajtazi

 

Interviewing people is so much fun! I actually never had the chance to really interview someone and ask them questions about their life and what they do, and what they care about… I really liked it.

After my interview with Bardh for the NewBorn Documentary I thought about how interesting it would be if I could interview even more people and get to know about their stories – because we all do have a story, don’t we?

First I was kind of excited about the interview, because I thought what if my questions are boring and his answers will be short, but I found out that that is impossible. Why am I saying that…? I just think that both parties, the interviewer and the interviewed person do the interview with the goal to speak out. Me as an interviewer will ask the questions that suit the story I want to tell and Bardh, in this case, as the interviewed person will tell his story because he wants people to know how he sees the world. I actually regretted that I didn’t take the Recording Equipment on the first day I met Bardh, because our conversation that day was so interesting and it just went on and on. We talked about everything.

This is exactly what I liked about the whole INTERVIEWING process; both sides are ready to speak up, to talk about the deep stuff and to share moments of truth with one another – which is not very common in today’s fast world in which we bore each other with SMALL TALKs, instead of talking about the “real” things.

There are so many stories… and I want to hear more of them. I am pretty sure this won’t be my last interview.

 

This week I finally had the chance to ask my questions! I met with my “NewBorn” person to do the interview. We actually discussed the topics of the interview earlier, which made it easier for both of us to focus on the main story we wanted to tell through the documentary. However, before it came to the FUN part, which was the interview for me, there was the process of preparation.

Firstly, I asked myself what exactly I want to show in the documentary of Bardh as a Youth Activist here in Prishtina, Kosovo. That’s why I thought it is a good idea to first meet with Bardh and get to know him – and yes, after our first meeting, in which Bardh told me a lot about his personal life but also about his activities as a youngster I had pretty much an idea of what the story of Bardh in this Newborn Documentary would be. Bardh was a very cooperative parner in this whole process with his own creative ideas he gave a lot of input in this first phase of the project.

The next step was the preparation of the Interview Questions. Since I had kind of the idea of how the story would be like, I had to think about adequate questions that support the story. This part was a little hard since I had to make sure that the questions connect and a “flow” is created, but I think I did a pretty good job on that.

The third step was to communicate to Bardh the main idea and ask him if we could get pictures of all those events he would talk about in the interview. Since there are not so many activities in Summer, it was kind of hard to get pictures of him in action while debating or at another movement he is part of, however, Bardh had some photos of those particular moments and we used them to supplement our Documentary with suitable pictures.

These were the 3 steps I had to take before doing the interview. I really liked working this way, but it was also necessary of course because I wanted to be ready and well prepared when I met Bardh for the Interview.

 

---

Remembering Srebrenica
By Lauren Peace

June 23rd, 2016

Do you remember when we learned about Srebrenica in school?

You wouldn’t. Because we didn’t.

At least I didn’t.

When I was first posed with the possibility of traveling to the Balkans to pursue documentary work on post-conflict transformation, I was confronted with a reality that I had gone blind to for so long.

Albania. Bosnia. Kosovo. Macedonia.

The familiarity lies in the name alone.

When I made the decision to travel to Kosovo for the summer, I made the decision to immerse myself in a culture that I had spent my first 20-years neglecting.

The history is striking. The timing is ironic.

I was born in Pennsylvania in the fall of 1995. Just 3 months earlier in Srebrenica, 8,000 Bosnians were slain by Serbs in what stands as Europe’s greatest genocide since World War II.

Today, a graveyard for the victims acts as a memorial. Tombstones line the fields in which innocent blood was shed – for nothing.

Hasan Hasanović is a survivor, and he welcomes us to the memorial.
 
He is strong and tranquil in semblance, but his eyes have seen sickening things.

Hasan survived by walking 63 km through a wooded area to the neighboring Muslim territory of Tuzla. Both his father and twin brother were lost at Srebrenica. He was just 19 at the time of the massacre.

“Everyday, I wonder where I got that strength. When you’re in that kind of situation, where every step is a matter of life and death, your mind just works differently. The experience has stayed with me since then. It follows me everyday; from the moment I get up, to the moment I go to sleep. I just can’t get rid of it. The worst thing is the anguish that comes with thinking about Husein and my father — wondering how they were killed, whether they were tortured or not, and how long it took them to die. That pain is almost unbearable.”

https://www.srebrenica.org.uk/survivor-stories/hasan-hasanovic/

 

Bosnia-Herzegovina continues to face ethnic conflict and division today. Many Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs hope for unity in the future, but events of the past linger. There is much more healing to be done and accountability to be held before the possibility of a concrete reconciliation.

Our first project for this class is called the ‘Newborns’ project, and is about exploring the lives of Kosovars in this generation after the war. With partners, we are to conduct an interview and make a series of images to go along with the audio we decide to use from the interview. Coming into this project, I didn’t expect to have a ton of work to do since Meredith and Jeta had spent so much time and effort making sure they contacted people already and confirmed that they would be interested in partaking in this project. However I found that, for whatever reason, something about this project whether it be the project itself or even the fact that it lined up right around the time Bajram celebrations were happening, was not clear to those who previously agreed to be subjects for it.

 

In class during the end of the first week, we were assigned partners and were to draw a number out of a hat. We chose number one, and was given information on who our subject was and her phone number to communicate with her. Later that night we messaged her and decided to meet up the following Monday to simply get a coffee to get to know each other a little before the interview. When Monday came around however, she had to push it to Thursday of that week. So we decided we would just jump straight into interviewing when we met with her on Thursday. Come Wednesday night and we are trying to figure out a time to do the interview on the following day and she tells us that she actually won’t be available until this Monday, July 11, 2016.

 

My partner and I decided that this would be too late to get all of the work we needed to get done on our project, so we found a new subject. Everything was set for the interview the next day around 10 am, however, you guessed it, 10am comes around and our new subject won’t answer any of our messages. My partner and I later find out that she was asleep until nearly 4pm. At this point we are getting a little frantic about finding a subject who will actually be able to follow through with this project. So we tagged along with Beki and her partner that morning to see if their subject might have a friend we could use as a subject. Turned out he did! So we messaged the girl who he said agreed to the project and planned to meet with her that night, this being Saturday night now, around 8pm. We were excited; she was a ballerina and seemed to be open to this project. Then around 7pm, we get a message. For the third time, our subject has bailed on us. It is just becoming a little ridiculous to us at this point that no one will actually commit and follow through with this project.

 

In the end, we successfully found a subject who agreed to help us with the project and has followed through. We have already finished the interview now, and have begun photographing and will continue tomorrow July, 11, 2016. You could say this project has been a bit of a fiasco, but it’s coming together quickly and soon enough we’ll move on to work on the final project.