The Year after Dayton

In 1995, the Dayton Peace Accords might have put an end to the three-and-a-half-year conflict in Yugoslavia, but they didn't stop the suffering. Refugees intermittently returned to their homes, bodies had to be buried, and cities rebuilt. Documentary filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter, who spent the first four seasons following Dayton in Bosnia and Herzegovina, captured the collective history of Yugoslavia in around 20 individual portraits. We meet a woman walking through her own backyard for the first time in years, or what's left of it - it's littered with debris from bombed-out apartment buildings. Then there's a couple that lives in the house of a Muslim family that fled and could come back at any moment, and children who are forced to spend the winter in a refugee camp. Using prolonged shots, Geyrhalter captures the bizarre reality of the post-war year in this massive, three-hour-plus production. He intercuts the observational cinema shots with interviews with the victims of war, interviews which he essentially leaves in their entirety. From numerous conversations, it becomes clear how the war between the various ethnic groups was fought over the heads of normal people. Before the conflict, they all lived in peace. Maybe some day that will be possible once again, but for the time being it seems like an unattainable utopia.