The Valley

Sometimes history has a very long breath. In 1389, a Serbian army was ousted from Kosovo by Islamic aggressors. In 1912, Kosovo was in turn annexed by Serbia. In 1998, a bloody war erupted between the predominantly Albanian inhabitants, demanding independence, and the Serbian rulers. In THE VALLEY, documentary filmmaker Dan Reed sheds light on the Kosovo crisis from both the Serbian and the Albanian-Kosovo side. He spent almost the entire year 1998 in the Drenica Valley, a stronghold of the Kosovo Liberation Army, and spoke with inhabitants of both Serbian and Albanian-Kosovo origin. It is striking to see how both parties try to justify their standpoint on the basis of old, almost mythical historical claims to the land. The Serbs argue that they have been resisting Islamic oppression for six hundred years and that they will keep on doing so to protect Christianity from barbarism. The Albanians even date their presence back an extra thousand years. In any case, they all agree that Tito’s death acted as a catalyst for those emerging nationalistic sentiments. They are sung about in melancholy folk songs, which vent the people’s feeling that they will not be expelled without bloodshed. If on the world stage we had not seen how horrific the consequences of these neighbours’ quarrels were, it would strike us almost as absurdist that both parties use identical arguments.