Belgrade-rs (2009)

This is the video I made in 2004.
Not many people from Serbia had a chance to travel during nineties - due to many reasons, not only financial. Serbs needed a visa for almost every country in the world, and people were often rejected if there was a slightest doubt that they might extend their stay in a foreign country (and get on a list of immigrants who need a social welfare). One of the sociological consequences of closed borders and the need to protect the common idea of national identity is the emergence of claustrophobic ghetto-like subcultural idioms, tendency to treat the unknown territory (e.g. EU) as the Other, something opposed to what "We" are -binary opposition "We" vs. "They" is present (personally, I have a problem to define "We" - but that may be a topic for some other discussion...). 
At the same time, I noticed that EU and US mass-media spread the same type of binary rhetoric, but of course, following the opposite direction. 
In this video I interviewed a few young people who did have a chance to travel, and now they speak about their impressions. I tried to depict this "view from the inside". As shown in the story of the first interviewer, the role of mass-media as a "messenger" had extremely high importance during the Balkan conflicts, but many people were aware of the possibility of media manipulation - thus, some of them ended up living in an anxious denial, like protagonist's father.

I deliberately left this video a bit raw, with background noise and hand-held camera feel.