“A few years ago I was in Prishtina with a friend from Croatia, miming at the guy behind the counter for beer. In the end my friend came out and asked ‘Imate li pivo, molim?’ There was a very complex reaction from the elderly shop assistant. He said, in Serbian, that he hadn’t spoken Serbian for such a long time. My friend from Croatia corrected him – she was from Croatia, and was actually speaking Croatian. And if his face fell a little, I don’t know. Someone else came in the shop, we made our purchase and left.”
Phil Collins often works in socially and politically contested regions, employing elements of popular culture, low budget television and reportage style documentary, to articulate a critical fascination with the ways in which contemporary media structure lived experience. Shot in black and white 16 mm film, the film weaves unbearably intimate close-ups into a fragmented and effective panorama of Kosovo’s recent past. Contributors include politicians, intellectuals and public figures as well as ‘ordinary’ people recounting in Serbian the reasons why they no longer speak the Serbian language. They range from attempts to historicize experience to deeply personal accounts of trauma and loss.
