The Road of Fraternity and Unity

On 3 November 1988, director Maja Weiss started shooting her road movie, travelling across the former Yugoslavian republics. Point of departure was the village of Metlika along the B51, a thoroughfare that had always been known as the road of fraternity and unity, but which during the war changed into a road of death and destruction. The B51 was constructed at the end of World War II, when a new connecting road between Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade and the Adriatic Sea was both an economic and ideological necessity. On her trip, Weiss spoke with various inhabitants of the regions she crossed about the country that they grew up in but that no longer exists. Weiss, too, grew up ‘nourished by the unity and fraternity within the Yugoslavian republics.‘ Her teachers taught her to love Tito, and her parents passed on their appreciation of George Gershwin’s to her.