BIRN on Screen: Two Decades of Reporting the Balkans on Film and TV

BIRN’s most-awarded film so far has been ‘The Unidentified’, directed by Marija Ristic in 2015, a powerful feature-length documentary that uncovered the identities of commanders behind brutal atrocities during the Kosovo war. Based on a two-year investigation, it named officers who ordered attacks on villages in 1999 then helped cover up the crimes by transferring victims’ bodies to mass graves in Serbia. Using unseen testimonies and documents, the film placed the crimes in the context of Slobodan Milosevic’s campaign to ethnically cleanse Kosovo.

Writing in the New York Review of Books, veteran Balkans correspondent and BIRN associate Tim Judah said that films like ‘The Unidentified’ showed that some people are “beginning to reassess what took place in their countries during the 1990s, even as there appears to be little political will in their countries to see that justice is fully done”.

Calling it an “extraordinary film”, Judah praised the inclusion of a dramatic interview with Zoran Raskovic, one of the Serbian perpetrators of the attacks.

‘Humane displacement’

The wars of the 1990s were also the context for ‘Your House Was My Home’, a documentary from 2017 that depicted the so-called “humane displacement” during the 1991-95 conflict in Croatia. It examined how Serbs and Croats from the villages of Kula in Croatia and Hrtkovci in Serbia voluntarily swapped homes during the campaign, which aimed at having ‘ethnically clean’ villages.

Veteran Croatian journalist Drago Hedl worked on the half-hour documentary after writing a series of features on the topic while working for the iconic Feral Tribune magazine.

“I was travelling around Slavonia [eastern Croatia] and saw men with professional fishing rods in the village of Kula,” Hedl told BIRN. It was a scene which did not fit the geography of the area, as there was no proper body of water anywhere near. Instead they were using them in small nearby creeks.

“After engaging in conversation with them, they told me that they are originally from Hrtkovci village, where they used to go fishing in the Sava river,” says Hedl. They told him in detail about how the displacement process worked. “So it was more about keeping the habit than catching fish for those men. But it was also a moment when I discovered this story and decided to work on it.”

Testament of the time 

While uncovering crimes and corruption, each of the BIRN’s productions serves to document the stories of those who feel the direct consequences of these actions. These are stories resulting from war crimes, including victim’s testimonials and genocide survivers. They are stories of victims of domestic violence, and of those who stand on the side of activism and fight for human rights and the environment.

‘The Majority Starts Here’, a feature-length film and TV series, followed six youngsters from ex-Yugoslav republics as they travel through the Balkans, exploring the enduring consequences of 20th century wars in the region.

In Sarajevo, they listened to reminiscences of life under siege during the 1992-95 war. In Montenegro, they found out about the legacy of the World War II Chetnik-Partisan divide in contemporary society. In Serbia and Kosovo, they examined the aftermath of the 1990s conflicts, meeting refugees and veterans, and confronting the horrors of the 1999 war.

While in Skopje, they witnessed Macedonia’s fixation on Alexander the Great through its towering monuments, and in Croatia they explored the wars’ economic toll on today’s youth. Like ‘Does Anyone Have a Plan?’, it was directed by Desmet.

Small-screen productions

Besides documentaries, BIRN’s organisations in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo have been producing television programmes for many years.

“We’ve done over 170 monthly episodes so far,” says Semir Mujkic, BIRN Bosnia and Herzegovina’s editor-in-chief.

Under the name Detektor TV, the show airs on more than 20 TV stations in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It mostly focuses on war-related transitional justice issues, but also follows current events.

“When the refugee crisis started in Bosnia and Herzegovina, there was a lot of animosity coming from the local population,” Mujkic says. It was a perfect opportunity to remind everyone of Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, and that many people in the country have been refugees themselves, he says.

“We found a family that fled from Bosnia to Syria during the war here, while at the same time we found a family that fled from Syria to Bosnia. They basically went the same way, just in opposite directions, which, I think, started changing the perception of the people towards refugees and migrants.”

In addition to the TV productions, a host of documentaries have come out of the newsroom in Bosnia in the past two decades, such as ‘Missing You’, which depicts the suffering of people whose family members disappeared during times of war and peace; ‘Silent Scream’, focusing on the trauma still affecting victims of wartime sexual violence 20 years after the end of the Bosnian conflict; ‘Underground’, a film about an underground hospital in the town of Olovo where wounded were treated and babies delivered during the war.

Last year, there was also ‘Pravda and Правда’, whose title combines the word pravda (justice) in Bosnian and правда (truth) in Ukrainian, released on November 5 to mark the 20th anniversary of the founding of BIRN Bosnia and Herzegovina. The film looks into transitional justice processes through the lens of former Ukrainian soldiers who served with peacekeeping missions in Bosnia.

BIRN Bosnia and Herzegovina has also produced several special video projects, like ‘Lives Behind the Fields of Death’, which recorded 100 testimonials from Srebrenica survivors and genocide victims’ families. The project became a permanent exhibition in Srebrenica Memorial Centre, where each of the testimonials is connected to one personal item displayed.

From that project, the crew found out about Samir Mehic, a rock musician from Srebrenica, nicknamed ‘Bowie’, who was killed in the genocide of Bosniaks by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995. The story of his life in the town before and during the war became a film, ‘Samir Mehic “Bowie” – Letters from Srebrenica’.

“We did a full production, we produced music, we had more than 20 extras on the set. One of our biggest fears was that we were putting a face to a man who was killed in a genocide,” Mujkic admits.

After premiering at Sarajevo Film Festival last year, the film “carried living on its own” and has had screenings across Europe and the US, he adds.

Bearing the consequences

Considering the issues tackled, it is no surprise that BIRN’s productions sometimes attract negative responses such as threats and attacks from war crimes deniers or people whose corrupt activities have been exposed.

‘Life in Kosovo’ and ‘Justice in Kosovo’ are two of BIRN’s current affairs series, and have been on air since October 2005. Hosted by BIRN Kosovo director Jeta Xharra, they are the most popular programmes of their kind in Kosovo, and tackle issues from politics and corruption to human rights and the environment. They were the first shows to bring ethnic Albanians and Serbs to the same table, giving them the opportunity to speak in their mother tongue.

Xharra is proud of her work. She says it is also the work of others, such as Faik Ispahiu, executive producer of BIRN Programmes, Kreshnik Gashi, author of the ‘Justice in Kosovo’ programme, and Albulena Sadiku, the deputy director of BIRN Kosovo, who fundraised for the TV programs.

Gashi himself was responsible for numerous TV investigations and documentaries, one of which resulted in the arrests of 40 police officers in Kosovo in 2019. Of these, 13 were convicted in 2023 of involvement in abusing their official positions to collude in the smuggling of various goods from the territory of Serbia into Kosovo and vice-versa.

“Kreshnik went overnight to a secluded area at the time where people didn’t dare to go during the day,” Xharra says. “He found evidence of this multi-ethnic smuggling scheme, which was later used in the investigation.”

A 2020 investigation into a solar park owner who stood to make almost 27 million euros of taxpayers’ money over the 12 years – in violation of rules drawn up to prevent the emergence of monopolies in the energy sector – resulted in the series being axed by Kosovo’s public broadcaster, RTK.

The episode started a chain reaction of investigations which led to changes in how subsidies work, but it proved too hot to handle for RTK. “In May 2020 we broadcast this episode and that month we were cut off. The director of public TV called me and said ‘that show created problems for us’”, remembers Xharra. From that moment the TV channel’s 15-year cooperation with a multiple award-winning programme was stopped.

As a result, both shows moved to another, private TV station, TV Dukagjini, and is now airing primetime three times a week under the name ‘Kallxo Pernime’. Co-produced by the media NGO Internews Kosovo, it employs more than 70 people to run the show.

“We did not want to go out under the same name, we are still the same people, tackling the same issues, just under a new name,” she said. “We want to save the name if one day the ‘weather changes’ and we are able to come back to the public TV [station].”