Carnival in the Eye of the Storm
War / Art / New Technologies: KOSOV@

Kosovo /Kosova has been referred to here as Kosov@ in the attempt to retain both the "o" and "a" characters used in both (Serbian and Albanian) spellings

FILM SERIES
The film series is curated by Trebor Scholz, presented by PNCA and kindly hosted by the
NW Film Center (Portland Art Museum).


APRIL 7 9 14 16 GUILD THEATER
FRI 7 7 P.M., SUN 9 7 P.M., FRI 14 7 P.M., SUN 16 7 P.M.
THE VALLEY
BRITAIN 1999
DIRECTOR: DAN REED

"THE VALLEY" is a unique documentary about the Kosovo war from inside Kosovo itself, crisscrossing the front lines, during vicious fighting which killed thousands and displaced 450,000 people. Filmed during the height of the carnage in September 1998, the weeks immediately preceding the first NATO bombing threats, and six months before the first bombs fell on Serb, it shows how the spiral of fear, hatred and killing, fueled by ancient myths, took on a logic of its own. As much about the delusions of the combatants as the fear and horror of ethnic war, THE VALLEY remains a painful, behind-the-scenes looks at the war in Kosovo." Dan Reed. (70 mins.)

APRIL 7 15 GUILD THEATER
FRI 7 8:30 P.M., SAT 15 9:30 P.M.
INTERVISTA
ALBANIA 1998
DIRECTOR: ANRI SALA

Anri Sala, the young son of the former head of the Communist Youth Alliance discovers a twenty-year-old 16mm film, the record of an interview with his mother. But the film is silent, the soundtrack lost with time along with the idealism that it captured. His mother no longer remembers what was said. Intent on finding the lost soundtrack, Anri seeks out anyone who might remember, including the producers of the film, but must finally take the film to lip readers at a school for the deaf. Finally confronting his mother with her younger self, past and present collide to offer a moving reflection on the chaos of personal and national history. (26 mins.)

APRIL 7 GUILD THEATER
FRI 9 P.M.
MACEDONIA: THE NEXT BOSNIA?
MACEDONIA 1995
DIRECTOR: JULIAN CHOMET

Shot secretly in Macedonia, Albania, Serbia and Greece, Chomet records street riots, pro-war rallies, and first-hand accounts of government sanctioned murders. Woven together with the observation of outside observers, a chilling picture is revealed of a the situation in Macedonia, where 500,000 ethnic Albanians live in constant fear and civil war threatens the stability of the whole region. (27 mins.)

APRIL 7 GUILD THEATER
FRI 9:30 P.M.
YUGOSLAVIA: ORIGINS OF WAR
YUGOSLAVIA 1992
DIRECTOR: CHRISTOPHE TALCZEWSKI

Using only archival and unpublished material, Talczewski provides a detailed background to the ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Focusing on the fighting's roots from the beginning of the 20th century, the high price of nationalism"throughout Eastern Europe"comes distressingly to light. (60 mins.)

APRIL 8 13 15 GUILD THEATER
SAT 8 4 P.M., THUR 13 7 P.M., SAT15 5:30 P.M.
The Walls of KOSOVO
YUGOSLAVIA 1999
DIRECTOR: ALEKSANDAR MANIC

At the height of the tension in Kosovo in the Spring of 1998, Prague-based Serb filmier Alexander Manic, armed only with a digital camera, crossed the borders of his native land in the hope of capturing the human face of a land largely misunderstood by the outside world. From his unique position as an ethnic Serb, Manic penetrates the lives of both Serb and Albanian families, exploring the religious, ethnic and historic symbolism of his torn landscape and people. (60 mins.)

APRIL 8 GUILD THEATER
SATURDAY 5:15 P.M.
UNDERGROUND
YUGOSLAVIA 1995
DIRECTOR: EMIR KUSTORICA

Winner of the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, UNDERGROUND is the national epic of a non-existent nation, tracing the inglorious history of Yugoslavia through three wars, each defined against separate forms of fascism: Nazi occupation during World War II, the high Cold War period's Tito-centrism and the crumbling civil-war ruin from within. Leapfrogging forward between massive set pieces at two or three decades per jump, Kusturica mixes slapstick, violence, spectacle and lyricism in a style that is a once grotesque, frenetic and darkly comic. No less than epic in scope and ambition, this visionary masterpiece is "mad, passionate, mordant, ferociously intelligent...exhilarating." Dave Kerr, New York Daily News. (167 mins.)

APRIL 8 14 16 GUILD THEATER
SAT 9 P.M., FRI 14 9:30 P.M., SUN 16 8:30 P.M.
PREDICTIONS OF FIRE
CANADA 1995
DIRECTOR: MICHAEL BENSON

In 1991, Slovenia's violent secession from Yugoslavia struck a first spark in
the Balkan War. Using an inventive combination of reportage, dramatization, archival footage, animation and miniatures, PREDICTIONS OF FIRE offers a revealing portrait of the internationally acclaimed Slovenian music and arts collective NSK, as seen through the lens of Balkan and recent Central European history. Shot in Ljubjana, Moscow, New York, Belgrade and Athens, this visually arresting film offers a revealing glimpse of a culture suspended between East and West and the powerful forces of conformity and ideology that shape international politics. Exploding the icons and myths of communism and capitalism, the film offers "a post-modern, quasi Godardian sensibility to show how politics invades every facet of artistic creation and how intregal ideology is to the understanding of the structure and signification of images." Variety. (95 mins.)

APRIL 9 GUILD THEATER
SUN 4 P.M.
PLANET SARAJEVO
BOSNIA 1994
DIRECTOR: SAHIN SICIC

"The fate of Sarajevo can befall any European city," warns the epigraph thatmends Sicis' film, an anti-travelogue of frightful immediacy and impact. A moody, Steadicam, ground-level tour through rubble-strewn, shell-shocked streets, all but abandoned to all but the most marginalized survivors. (27mins.)

APRIL 9 GUILD THEATER
SUN 8:30 P.M.
YELLOW WAPS: ANATOMY OF A WAR CRIME
YUGOSLAVIA 1995
DIRECTOR: ILAN ZIV

The Yellow Wasps was a Serbian paramilitary unit operating in Bosnia in 1972. They called themselves volunteer patriots, but to their victims they were criminals, sent to pillage and murder as part of a long-standing plan of Serbian aggression. Now refugees, the victims, "cleansed" from their homes, recount their tales of torture and massacre by the Yellow Wasps. (70 mins.)

APRIL 13 GUILD THEATER
THURS 8:15 P.M.
A CRY FROM THE GRAVE
BRITAIN 1999
DIRECTOR: LESLIE WOODHEAD

Why were we so docile and why did we stand by passively? It is one of the confrontational questions Hasan Nuhanovic poses at the end of A CRY FROM THE GRAVE, a reconstruction of the massacre of more than 7000 Muslims in Srebrenica, Bosnia in July 1995. On the basis of archival footage, news footage, spoken memories and, until recently, unknown images, the film tries to find an answer to this and other mysteries, especially how, under the supposedly watchful eye of the United Nations, and at the end of a century of unspeakable human tragedy, such horrific genocide could still take place. Winner of the Special Jury Award at the 1999 Amsterdam International Documentary Festival. (104 mins.)

APRIL 15 GUILD THEATER
SAT 7 P.M.
PRETTY VILLAGE, PRETTY FLAME
YUGOSLAVIA 1996
DIRECTOR: SRDJAN DRAGOJEVIC

Loosley based on a true incident, Dragojevic's multi-layered narrative focuses on a bloody, ten-day stand-off between Muslims and the Serbs they have trapped in a tunnel linking Zagreb with Belgrade. The Brotherhood and Unity tunnel is used as a symbolic staging ground in which the desperate soldiers act out serio-comic vignettes covering a wide rage of topics before they are killed off one by one. While a bracing antiwar diatribe&Mac247;assailing Croats, Muslims, Serbs, the press and the oxymoronic peacekeeping forces for their complicity in perpetuating the war&Mac247;the film is also as cinematically inventive and gorgeously produced as it is politically strident. "Wilder in its black humor than M.A.S.H., bolder in its vision than any movie Stanley Kubrick has made, this is one of the most audacious anti-war statements ever committed to the big screen."Variety. (128 mins.)

APRIL 15 16 GUILD THEATER
SAT10 P.M., SUN 4:30 P.M.
VICTIM OF GEOGRAPHY
SCOTLAND 1999
PRODUCER: PICTORIAL HEROES

Filmed between 1995-99, VICTIM OF GEOGRAPHY is an anthem from a camcorder generation that walks on the weird, wild wired sides of pre-millennium Europe. On a journey that begins in the ruins of Sarajevo and ends at Scotland's most northerly extreme (Cape Wrath), it offers a postcard from the abyss. A glimpse of Europe on edge. A soul dive into and across troubled times and shifting territory." Doug Aubrey. (60 mins.)