Back Story to Balkan Rhapsodies:
Balkan Rhapsodies as a project began rather unexpectedly and innocently, in 1999, while I was working as a video producer at MIT. I was spending considerable time working with linguistic professor Noam Chomsky on several non-related projects for the institute and was inspired by his political commitment and commentary. It was through our casual conversations and my continued exposure to Chomsky’s work where I finally became activated towards social responsibility. During our work at MIT in March of 1999, by happenstance, the NATO bombings of Serbia and Kosovo began, which would end up lasting for 78 days. Having no ethnic ties to the region and a very limited knowledge of Yugoslavia’s past I was mystified by the intense ethnic conflict that had arisen and the general lack of the American interests in US foreign policy and military activities. My dialogues with Chomsky led me toward many more questions about what was really going on in Former Yugoslavia that were not being answered in the mainstream media, so I rather capriciously decided to go to see it with my own eyes. I flew to Greece and after two weeks of pleading, negotiated my way into the country with the help of Yugoslav filmmaker Emir Kusturica and his producers at Komuna. Emir’s producers wrote me a sponsorship letter that convinced the Milosovic regime that I was not a CIA spy. From that point I flew to Budapest and then traveled by bus to Belgrade and was greeted as the first American to be allowed entry to Serbia after the American led bombings.
While in Serbia I was often first met with suspicion about my intentions, but I quickly gained the trust of many young people who took me into their lives. I stayed in their homes and their dens, talking and drinking with them late into the nights. Towards the end of my first journey I was also interviewed on Studio B’s National new program to discuss my opinions about what I saw in Serbia. The intimacy of the relationships with the many people I encountered on my journey had a profound effect on me and although I didn’t know it at the time, that experience has continued to inform my creative and personal life.
Over the years I made a few more trips collecting testimonies and observations of life in Serbia and Kosovo without a clear understanding why I was doing it. It was not until I had some distance from my experiences that I could see the material in a new way and I began reconstructing the material into was is not the Balkan Rhapsodies.