Kosovo: Can You Imagine? is about the Serbs that live in Kosovo and the lack of human rights that they have today, in the 21st century. Most of the Kosovo Serbs have been ethnically cleansed by the Albanians who make up the majority of Kosovo. Kosovo has been under UN administration since 1999 when NATO bombed Serbia for 76 days to halt a crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatism in its province of Kosovo. In the years following the war, thousands of Serbs were expelled from their homes, kidnapped and killed. Their houses, cultural and religious sites were burned and destroyed. Kosovo for the Serbs is what Jerusalem is for the Jewish people. It is the cradle of their statehood, culture and religion. Most of the important Serbian Christian Orthodox monasteries are in Kosovo. Today, Serbs still have a deep spiritual and traditional connection to Kosovo, a land which is being cleansed of everything Serbian.
Reviews
"Kosovo: Can You Imagine?" is a Canadian half-hour documentary from 2009, so this one will have its 10th anniversary soon. This one was written and directed by Boris Malagurski, who was still incredibly young when he worked on this one and yes he is still making films today. A lot in here is not in the English language, so chances are high you will need subtitles. The Kosovo conflict was a subject that was present in the media for quite a while, also way before this film was made, but at some point it just disappeared almost completely and made room for subjects the media deemed more importand and worthy to report on. And all this with the issues here far from solved. It did not just lose attention, but completely vanished from the mainstream media, which is another example of how neutral reports are something you are not gonna find on television, papers etc. today. So even if this is far from a new film, we can be glad that Malagurski brought some attention back here on individual fates, but also the situation as a whole. I will not even deny that here and there the production values looked a bit cheap admittedly, but we also need to keep in mind where this was filmed and under which circumstances and that the filmmaker was quite a rookie at this point. All these facts (not excuses) make it easy to look beyond the flaws here and there and enjoy (not sure that is the right word) and appreciate this little severely underseen movie. I am also surprised that this one received zero awards attention apparently and that is fairly shocking, but can perhaps also be seen as a political decision. In any case, this is certainly among the best 2009 has to offer in short films and documentaries and I highly recommend checking it out. Big thumbs-up here. Go for it.
Serbian propaganda is known for producing such biased pseudo- documentaries with a clear chauvinistic agenda. This agenda with its roots in the ex Soviet Union's school of manipulating the truth for own political means.Shameful pieces of Serbian propaganda such as this can't hide the truth about war crimes perpetuated by Serbian paramilitary troopers and their secret police. According to the legally binding verdict of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Federal Army and Serbian police after the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia 24 March 1999, systematically attacked villages with Albanian population, abused, robbed and killed civilians, ordering them to go to Albania or Montenegro, burning their houses and destroying by their property. Within the campaign of violence, Albanians were mass expelled from their homes, murdered, sexually assaulted, and their religious buildings destroyed. Serbian forces committed numerous war crimes during the implementation of "joint criminal enterprise" whose aim was to "through the use of violence and terror, force a significant number of Kosovo Albanians to leave their homes, across the border, the state government to retain control over Kosovo". Ethnic cleansing of the Albanian population is performed by the following model: first the army surrounded a place, then followed the shelling, then the police entered the village, and often with them and the army, and then crimes occurs (murders, rapes, beatings, expulsions...).Presiding Judge Iain Bonomy was imposing sentence said, "deliberate actions of these forces during the campaign provoked the departure of at least 700,000 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo in the short period from late March to early June 1999."Incomplete list of massacres:Suva Reka massacre — 48 Albanian civilians victims, among them many children. Račak massacre — 45 Albanians villagers were murdered by Serb forces. Podujevo massacre - 19 Albanian civilians, including women, children and the elderly, killed by Serb paramilitary. Massacre at Velika Krua — according to the Court, Serbian special police units murdered 42 persons. There is also allegetions of females mass raped. Izbica massacre — Serbian forces killed about 120 Albanian civilians. Drenica massacre — there were 29 identified corpses of massacre, committed by Serbian law enforcement forces. Gornje Obrinje massacre - 18 bodies were found, but more people slaughtered. Cuska massacre — 41 known victims. Bela Crkva massacre — 62 known victims Orahovac massacre — from 50 to more than 200 ethnic Albanian civilians victims Dubrava Prison massacre — Serbian prison guards killed more than 70 Albanian prisoners. Ćuka massacre near Peć on May 14, 1999 attributed to the akaliGoran Stoparić, ex-member of Special Anti-terrorist Unit (SAJ), speculating about motives behind Podujevo massacre, said:"In my opinion, the only motive was the fact that the victims were Albanians, and perhaps because of some hidden immaturity or sickness of mind on their part. They would probably have killed them had they been Bosnians or Croats. But it is certain that they were killed because they were not Serbs".Number of victims in the Kosovo war 13,000 people killed, out of whom over 10,000 were Albanians. The true number of deaths continues to be disputed as the number of Albanian civilians still missing since the war reaches up to 3000.
Malagurski is something of a hero among Serbians and the Serbian diaspora. He has made himself a hero by making wholly one-sided accounts of both ancient and recent history, often based on 'factual sources' that have been totally discredited in both the mainstream media and often also in International Courts.Whether his account in this film is exaggerated I don't know, however he throws away any plausible claim to objectivity by simply ignoring the attempted expulsion of virtually the entire Albanian population of Kosovo, which was the catalyst for NATO action there. This attempted expulsion (complete with well-documented evidence of rape, brutal violence, and systematic looting), was attempted by Serbian para-militaries acting under direct instruction from Milosevic making a last-ditch attempt to hang onto power.I feel sorry for Serbians if they are being badly treated in Kosovo, if this is happening it does not bode well for long-term peace there, but who is really to blame for that happening? Milosevic was given multiple explicit warnings as to what would happen if he chose to continue impeding UN observers and encouraging inter-ethnic abuses.
I tried watching this film an hour ago and have to say it's probably one of the most biased films I have ever seen. I say "tried" because I didn't bother watching it through... I just left it.The film portrays the situation in modern-day Kosovo from a Serbian perspective. Granted it talks about a situation which is a reality, with the little Serbs remaining in the country left to deal with abuse on their own whilst being governed by a prime-minister known for its criminal ties, but very conveniently hides facts which led to the end of the former Republic of Jugoslavia.If you ended up wanting to watch this after having watched the BBC documentary "The Death of Jugoslavia", look elsewhere - there are a lot of good books out there about this topic which are a lot less biased.That's exactly why I thought the last reviews were strange and why I decided to lookup their authors - who, surprise surprise, wrote nothing else on IMDb. Weird, no?