Kosovo film festival presents BIRN war crimes documentary

The Unidentified, the feature-length documentary by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), will have its first open screening this week at DokuFest in Prizren, Kosovo.

The film, which identifies the Serbian officers who ordered attacks on villages around the town of Peć/Peja in 1999, will be screened on Wednesday 12 and Thursday 13 August.

“The DokuFest screening has a special meaning for us, as the movie deals with events that happened 16 years ago just few a kilometres from Prizren and the Kosovo audience will be the first to see it,” said Marija Ristic, the director of the documentary.

BIRN’s documentary examines the events of 1999, in which Serbian fighters killed more than 118 Albanian civilians in the villages of Ljubenić, Ćuška, Pavljan and Zahac, some of the bodies of whom were later found in mass graves at the Batajnica police training centre near Belgrade in 2001.

The trial of 11 men alleged to have been involved in the massacres is ongoing in Belgrade. In February 2014, nine were sentenced to a total of 106 years in jail, but the appeals court in Belgrade annulled the verdict in March this year and sent the case for retrial.

The Unidentified gives voice to the perspectives of those on both sides of the attack and the subsequent court case, with footage of personal testimony from victims and perpetrators.

BIRN is a network of journalists that aims to enable reporting and debate of the most crucial political, social, economic and cultural issues in the Balkan region, particularly those pertinent to successful European integration. The organisation is partly funded by the European Union.

The 14th annual DokuFest film festival will run until 16 August. 228 films from 43 countries will be screened, this year centering on the theme of migration.