Intercultural cinema and Balkan hushed histories

Abstract

Everybody in the Balkans has fought against everybody else and has practiced the assimilation business at some point. The official history books of each Balkan nation tell the past in a way that implies idiosyncratic and often self‐serving approaches to reconciling conflicting historical records of contested events. The narratives of displacement and assimilations that have taken shape as part of bigger historical processes are usually contested and remain suppressed in official historiography. They are regularly avoided in public discourse yet are nonetheless kept alive in oral history and are tackled in anthropological writing. Films that address these issues are considered highly awkward. In my paper I will look at the cinematic representation of some of these ‘hushed histories’ from the Balkans, concerning forgotten forced population movements, linguistic coercion and identity curtailment. I will consider several important and politically sensitive cinematic texts made across the region, all of which address the divided state of the nation whose discourse they are tackling (e.g. Crno seme/Black Seed, Yugoslavia/Macedonia, Kiril Tsenevski, 1971; Mera spored mera/Measure for Measure, Bulgaria, Georgy Dyulgerov, Citation1981; Taxìdi sta Kìthira/Voyage to Cythera, Greece, Theo Angelopoulos, 1984; Kalì patrìda, sìntrofe!/Welcome Home, Comrade!, Greece, Lefteris Xanthopoulos, 1986; Bulutlari beklerken/Waiting for the Clouds, Turkey/France/Germany/Greece, Yesim Ustaoglu, Citation2004). These films are contentious because they often depict events that take place on foreign territory people that are de facto foreign subjects. The directors of these films believe that issues of identity can be addressed adequately only by including in the national narrative the experiences of those whose lives have been, for one reason or another, spent outside of the (shifting) nation‐state borders of their respective countries.

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