COMRADES

World Premiere
February 25, 2001

Cinequest San Jose Film Festival

Absolutely riveting documentary about a guy who finds a picture from 1981 of his army unit and tries to reunite with each person in the picture after the breakup of Yugoslavia. I usually turn the channel when a story about the former Yugoslavia is on, but this film did a fantastic job of putting faces on a conflict I have little knowledge about. It's sort of a GREAT DAY IN HARLEM in Macedonia. He must find 15 or so men who have scattered throughout seven or eight different countries. He continually remarks when people ask him what ethnic group a buddy belongs to, that they never discussed such things while in the army. He goes to towns where the new leaders have completely changed the street names to erase proof of Yugoslavia. This provides a logistical nightmare as our narrator must go across borders to find people who are now enemies to each other. When he describes his plan to townspeople, they shake their heads in disbelief. Some of his buddies are dead, some have disappeared, most have demolished houses. In one memorable scene, we see the childhood home of an army buddy with the living room in Croatia and the bedroom squarely in Bosnia. All of this could still be boring, but somehow the humor of Mitko Panov's story is just what we need to take us along. I learned more about the conflict from this film than any ten newsreports.