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The Unidentified, which names the Serbian officers who ordered attacks on Kosovo villages around the town of Pec/Peja in 1999 and those involved in the cover-up operation to hide the victims’ bodies, was awarded the best short documentary prize at the South East European Film Festival in Los Angeles on Thursday.

Nemanja Babic, the director of the film, told the audience at the Fine Arts Theatre in Beverly Hills that work on the film continued for two years as the production team struggled to persuade all those involved, both perpetrators and victims, to give interviews for the documentary.

“It took us months to convince a lot of people to appear in this documentary. Some of the witnesses first said yes and then they would change their mind once we pressed ‘play’ on the camera,” Babic said.

“This prolonged the whole process of filming, but in the end the work paid off and this prize also inspires us to continue working on this topic,” he added.

The Unidentified takes viewers back to 1999, to the villages of Ljubenic, Cuska, Pavljan and Zahac near Pec/Peja in Kosovo, where Serbian fighters killed more than 118 Albanian civilians. Their bodies were either burned or removed, and some of them were later found in mass graves at the Batajnica police training centre near Belgrade in 2001.

The trial of 11 fighters alleged to have been involved in the killings – 10 of them accused of being direct perpetrators – is still ongoing in Belgrade.

In February 2014, nine of them were sentenced to a total of 106 years in jail but an appeals court annulled the verdict last March, calling it “incomprehensible and contradictory” and sent the case for retrial.

The film had its international premiere at last year’s Sarajevo Film Festival and has been screened at various other festivals and institutes, in Paris, New York, Washington DC, Zagreb, Belgrade, Prizren, Pristina, Tirana, Maribor and Los Angeles.

The Unidentified will also be screened for the first time in Belgrade on May 14 at this year’s BELDOCS film festival.

With the participation of the ERSTE Foundation, Open Society Foundations and BIRN, fellows from Albania, Kosovo, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece and Macedonia came together with the Fellowship team to begin work on their in-depth stories.

They received practical tips from Fellowship programme editors, focused on planning, research, reporting and writing, as well as individually tailored advice and workshops on multimedia journalism.

The sessions were led by former Reuters bureau chief for the Balkans Andrew Gray, who was BFJE editor for the previous two years, and his successor as BFJE editor Matt Robinson, who also formerly led the Reuters bureau in Belgrade. Matt will now mentor and support the fellows over the months to come.

The 10 journalists also benefited from a workshop by Romanian photographer Cosmin Bumbut and BFJE alumna Elena Stancu, an EU Press prize nominee in 2015, on the value of multimedia in storytelling.

The fellows now embark on four months of research, reporting and writing, involving trips within Europe, before submitting their final work.

 

The South East European Media Observatory brought together journalists and media experts in Sarajevo on April 14 to discuss the reasons for the deterioration of media integrity in the region at a round-table entitled ‘How to save the integrity of journalism and the media? Learning lessons from good practice in the protection of media integrity in the countries of south-east Europe’.

The panellists said that the issues that usually affect media integrity include problematic and non-transparent ownerships, politically-controlled advertisng and non-transparent state advertising.

Although the situaiton in media previous years has been worsening, they said there were some examples of good practice in defending media freedoms, citing the weekly magazine Novosti in Croatia, the online magazine Žurnal.info and the Buka online portal from Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Sarajevo-based Centre for Investigative Reporting and the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN.

“All the good examples are non-profit media, established by journalists, and they are all clear what the purpose of journalism is. They are clear about their public mission, and journalism as a public service,” Brankica Petkovic of the Peace Institute from Ljubljana said during the discussion.

“Only journalists can save journalism – not the state, not the government, not researchers,” Petkovic added.

The panellists expressed concern about a sigificant decline in foreign financial support for independent media in the region, which is threatening their sustainability.

BIRN regional network director Gordana Igric said this should be addressed as a matter of urgency.

“Media debates in the region should therefore only be directed towards finding new ways of funding investigative and independent reporting,” said Igric.

“Investigative reporting is expensive and some of the biggest media outlets, like Britain’s The Independent, have failed to find a sustainable model and faced closing. If such big media shut down, this could happen to anyone,” she warned.

The round-table participants concluded that they ought to start searching for and developing new financial models because although Balkan countries are in great need of objective and independent journalism, ways have to be found for these media to become sustainable.

Six features by Barbara BFJE alumna Matejcic, covering the problems of rejection, handicap and the power of superstition – but also people’s strength of purpose – are being published in Croatia.

“Kako ste?” [“How are you?”], published by Heinrich Boll, looks at the fate of so-called second-class citizens who are often invisible to most of society.

The features ask what it means to live with mental illness, what obstacles Roma children must overcome to be educated, what goes through the mind of a motionless person, how families with an undesirable national stigma survive in Croatia and what the fears of young women oppressed because of their sexual orientation are – among others.

A freelance journalist and editor from Zagreb in Croatia, Matejcic has long specialized in covering social issues.

She was recognized for the best written journalistic work in 2013 with the “Marija Juric Zagorka” award by the Croatian Journalists’ Association in 2014, and for the promotion of peace, nonviolence and human rights with the “Krunoslav Sukić” award (Center for Peace, 2013).

She received recognition for best monitoring of LGBT themes in Croatia from 2000 to 2010 from Zagreb Pride in 2011.

Matejcic was a BFJE fellow in 2009. Her story focused on the phenomenon of mixed marriages in cities that were once multi-ethnic communities in the former Yugoslavia, but which were destroyed by the war in the 1990s.