4 films we worked with during the last month of 1999.

Do you remember; last year we worked a month with Bart Lodewijks and Gerard Hulsenbeck. They came to make a film about the economical and ecological situation in a post war society.
Probably the subject was a little to big for them, partly because the are skilled more on artistic level as on journalistic level.
Because of that it took a while before the montage of the film was ready. I've seen some try outs and was not really impressed. But now I got the final version and it must be said; the film is much better as I expected.
The film is called "Boro, why did you stay?". In this film several local people who speak about the live they must build up again, international workers who have to use quite a lot of explanations to justify their own presence in BiH and a deminingteam that takes the role a metaphore for the very limited space to manouvre for all people involved.
Critical, artistic and timely allthough you must be a little bit informed about the situation.
The public broadcast system VPRO, who gave the camera for this film, decided not to broadcast this film because it was said it was not timely anymore but I think that is rubbish.
Information about this film can be obtained through POO of through Bart Lodewijks

2.
Jayce Salloum is a Canadian filmer. He spend several weeks in the complete Balkan region of which three days in Sarajevo, as guest of POO. He interviewed a dozen of people. These interviews all spoke about one subject; transition. The film will be shown as video installation at the Museum of Civilization. He told me that the whole idea of Balkan will hardly be traceable in the final video installation. A very energetic and selfconfident man.

3.
Eric Triantafillou is an American filmer with Greek roots. He was three month is Bosnia and is searching for his images. A big collection interviews and many instigations to let local people take over the initaiative of the film must lead to his second independent documentary. The first time he showed his film on collages and highschools. He invited Balkan refugees living in the USA to speak about the movie. An interactive project, as well here in Bosnia but also in his homestate California. In this occasion Eric does not only gives local people time to discover whatever is there to discover, but also uses the time to get wiser himself.
POO in this case worked mainly as driver.

4.
Finally POO gave information to Eric v.d. Broek and Katarine Rejger.
They made their own film but returned to Bosnia als a free lance team to shoot some additional recording for the Dutch TV program NOVA. The subject was 'the murder of the century'. Of course that was about Gavrillo Prinzip who shot Prinz Ferdinand and became the trigger of one, two maybe even three wars in the Balkan region.
But they also made a film called Sarajevo Circus. An extreme tough film about the internationals working in Bosnia Hercegovina. A documentary, probably on some way inspired by the film of Bart and Gerard.
Although I think it is good to show also the not so great side of the international aid and it's concequences, they might have been more exact about who is really taking a benefit for it. Because it the NGO world there are more people wiling to speak, their words were used the most and therefor it seen that the NGO's really screwed up. But in fact their words are reflecting all internationals of which most of them work for GO's and not for NGO's.
Now they are working on a project called video letters and I really hope to inform you about it in a later stadium because it seems really good.