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Director's Statement
In the early 90s I was offered a lectureship in the US. I accepted it and went on to complete it with success. However, I felt like a fugitive, like some sort of "voluntary refugee". I left behind my mother, my home, a country that was falling apart, wars, friends, my flat and my career as a film director. Although I formed a number of new friendships and had a decent life — I was lonely. During my walks across New York I noticed that I had begun having fictional conversations with all the people I had left behind in Belgrade and Yugoslavia, including my late father who died years ago. I looked at the world around me through new eyes and saw new people, films, shop windows, landscapes that I thought they would like. Sometimes I even found myself acting on the advice that they may have given me had they been real.
Meanwhile, I followed the increasing lines of refugees from all over Yugoslavia on TV. These survivors of ethnic cleansing were wandering from one part of the country to another, carrying with them memories of their past lives. I felt very close to them, although I was an entirely different kind of refugee, one surrounded by comparative luxury.
My thoughts on refugees went even further. The modern world was actually full of them. I realised that nearly every big city in the world was full of people who spend their lives far away from their homelands in new surroundings. In that sense, my hometown of Belgrade had become, like London, New York, Paris, Prague and many others — a place full of people unused to it. Even though people born and bred in big cities, including Belgrade, often look down on refugees, they are the necessary strength that protects these places from degeneration and decadence. Perhaps refugees and migrants, despite the sorrow and the surface primitivism that they carry with them, bring the city health and new hope. That is how it all started.