“Anesthetized by the fall of the Berlin Wall, my generation made the mistake of thinking that democracy was no longer a fight”

Grandstand. In July 2000, we left with Chris Marker (1921-2012), 80 years old, who was this wise observer filmmaker of his century. A Kosovar road trip had taken us from hospital visits to interviews to meet doctors who had just lived through the last battles of the last Balkan war.

What had begun in Kosovo with a nationalist speech by Slobodan Milosevic in 1989 and had continued with the sieges of Vukovar, in Croatia, of Sarajevo, in Bosnia, and up to the genocide of Srebrenica, came to aground here on the Kosovo land with the last massacres committed by Serbian militiamen in February of that year.

A survey of brotherhood

From this last trip by Chris Marker, we would return with a film, “A mayor in Kosovo”, portrait of the surgeon Bajram Rexhepi (1954-2017), fighter of the UCK – the Kosovo Liberation Army – and this year- there, mayor of his city. He would soon be the prime minister of Kosovo and an ardent campaigner for his young country’s entry into the European Union, as a definitive anchor for democracy and a guarantee of peace for his daughters.

As for all of his generation born between the wars, Marker’s world had been marked by deportation and the Shoah and, as André Malraux had written, this quest for “the crucial region of the soul where absolute evil opposes brotherhood” (The Mirror of Limbo). He was filming Kosovo with other images in mind. Those, intimate, of his American comrades whom he had accompanied at the age of 25, from the landing in Normandy to Germany; those of Night and Fogdirected with Alain Resnais.

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The history of this end of century had led him to continue his investigation of fraternity, at the heart of the Moscow trials or the coups d’etat of Greek colonels and Chilean generals. Marker, also a photographer, had at home a box of his own images from the shooting of two great films by his friend Costa Gavras, Confession and Z. He could also have in mind his story of fraternity behind closed doors of a French embassy in the heart of Santiago (Chile) under siege and his images of arrests by men in fatigues which could also have taken place in Warsaw, Prague , Bucharest, and soon maybe Kiev.

That summer we met in Kosovo after Marker wrote me what I have never forgotten: “The whole Kosovo/Serbia story has pretty much demolished me on one specific point: whether we like it or not, there is coming an age of balance sheets, and this war was the condensed version of all the failures, all the lies and all the pitfalls that my generation had to deal with, with the added bonus, this time, of the impression that the film had started upside down. »

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