Eurasia Press & News
The legendary Bosnian filmmaker, who has just produced a new docu-film, discusses identity, Balkan Beats, migration – and how a near-death experience in the Bosnian war almost ended his career before it began.
Bosnian filmmaker Sergej Kreso – who just came out with a new docu-film on Balkan Beats DJ Robert Šoko – sometimes begins interviews by recounting a brush with death he had as a young journalist from Sarajevo at the outbreak of 1992-5 war in Bosnia.
It was the first day of the war in Doboj, in northern Bosnia, when the whole town woke up to find itself occupied by the Bosnian Serb army. Kreso naively believed that there must have been some kind of cosmic misunderstanding and everything would calm down in a couple of days.
On his way to the local radio station, he was intercepted at an army checkpoint. The Serb soldiers – young, nervous and trigger-happy – demanded his papers.
“What’s his name?” barked the commander.
“Sergej Kreso,” said a young soldier, reading Kreso’s ID card.
“It’s good,” thought Kreso. “My name is okay.”
But then the soldier took out of his pocket a bundle of papers with names and started to search for Kreso’s. At some point the commander said: “And the name of the father?” The soldier read it: “Esad” – a Muslim.
“Some people say if you are about to die, your whole life flashes by you,” recalls Kreso. “But in my case, it was not my whole life, but the six ages of Bosnia and Hercegovina that flashed by me in an instant. Christianity, Turks, all of it.”
The upshot was, in the confusion of the moment, Sergej grabbed his ID, said he was on urgent business and couldn’t be held up, and hastened on his way.
“Be careful of snipers!” shouted the commander sardonically at his back.
Sergej Kreso – is he a Muslim, Croat or Serb? One can’t pigeonhole him neatly from his name alone. The one thing one could perhaps infer from the name Sergej is that his parents were Russophiles when Kreso was born in Sarajevo in 1963.
Kreso is of mixed parentage – Muslim father, Serbian mother. This perhaps accounts for how little stock he places in ethnic or religious identity. Instead, through much of his life, it was via music that he defined himself.
Kreso got his start in life as a musician in Sarajevo, playing drums in a New Primitivist band, Elvis Kurtovic and the Meteors, and with the artist Gino Banana, who would soon emigrate to Seattle and form Balkan punk band Kultur Shock.
Upon moving to the Netherlands following the outbreak of war, in 1993, Kreso embarked on a career as a documentary filmmaker, employing war, immigration and music as themes. He has completed eight films, the last of which, Here We Move Here We Groove, tells the story of a fellow Bosnian Balkan Beats DJ in the midst of a midlife crisis. It is currently on show at cinemas around Europe.
Kreso likes to tell stories about Sarajevo at the end of the eighties, a time when – for a certain group of young people – what counted more than religion and ethnicity was the way one dressed, behaved and the music one listened to.
Sarajevo was then considered a musical Mecca.
“Nationality and religious identity didn’t mean a thing to my generation,” says Kreso. “And yet, we were, in a sense, almost hard-line Stalinists, so to speak: if I went to some party at someone’s home and they were playing the wrong music, I would leave immediately. And one of the wrong kinds of music was certainly folk music; narodna music.
“Because I was born in the sixties and had my formative years in the seventies and eighties, the influence of punk music and New Wave was huge in my life. The whole scene in Yugoslavia was really strong in this regard. It was an important part of my identity, cultural identity, and especially musical, subcultural identity.”
Kreso’s move to the Netherlands in 1993 was more or less a fluke. One day during the war, he happened to meet on the street the mother of a good friend. Sergej asked about her son and she told him that he had fled to the Netherlands. She also told him how a few days previously she had received a letter from him in which he asked, among other things, if she knew where Sergej was and how he was faring. He also wrote that he could help Sergej if he also chose to come to the Netherlands.
“In those dark days of war, this seemed like a little light at the end of a tunnel and I decided to accept his invitation,” Kreso told BIRN..
Kreso is a product of his time when it comes to his musical predilections. For much of his life, music for him meant Rock n’ Roll. Gypsy music and what would later become known as “Balkan Beats” didn’t register for him. It was decidedly “uncool”.
“My first contact with Goran Bregovic’s music was back in Sarajevo, right before the war. If I look back on the film Time of the Gypsies (1988), Bregovic was already playing with the Gypsy music of the Balkans. So it was not really new, not so revolutionary.
But after that, his vision became clearer and more defined. Bregovic was even in the first days of his band, Bijelo Dugme, playing with folk motifs. But it appeared to me to be a very commercial, calculated approach, designed to reach a huge public. I believed at the time that 60 to 70 per cent of Yugoslavians still lived in villages, athis accounted for the success of Bregović and the low estimation in which I held him.”
It took emigration to the Netherlands for Kreso to change his perception. There, he became totally and utterly surprised by the phenomenon of Balkan Beats – a loose term used to denote a mix of traditional, ethno music from the Balkans, blended with heavy dollops of electronica, bass and break-beats. For Kreso it was a kind of “culture shock”, he says.
“I was at the Paradiso, a famous Amsterdam club that had hosted The Rolling Stones unplugged. It was the temple of rock music. And here, in 2007, they started to play Balkan Beats. I was blown away and completely disoriented as I listened to Boban Marković and his orchestra, Plavi Orkestra – I even knew some of the guys that were making the music that I was listening to in Paradiso. I thought, ‘Oh my God, if I had the telephone number of the lead singer from Plavi Orkestra, I would call him up now, to tell him: “Your music is being played in Paradiso!’ and he would be incredulous. I mean, these weren’t refugees from Bosnia dancing; these people were young, white students dancing like mad to something that was a part of me.”
Suddenly the idea crystalized in Kreso’s head, which would become a lasting idée fixe and dominant theme for his movies – the interwovenness of music and immigration.
“If you are thinking about the cultural and sociological reasons for the success of Balkan Beats, I believe that the answer resides in the fact that it is a migrant production,” says Kreso. “Even if we are talking about Goran Bregović and about Emir Kusturica, – both guys lived outside as migrants. Kusturica left Sarajevo even before the war to work as a film professor in some university in the United States. And then he made the film Arizona Dream.
“I believe that all of us needed that almost physical distance to see really clearly the cultural treasure of the Balkans.”
Kreso’s new film, Here We Move Here We Groove, is not only the story of a Balkan Beats DJ and his midlife crisis, but about refugees – specifically refugees and music. The movie, after all, was made at the time of massive influx of refugees from Syria into Europe. We meet them gathered around roadsides as the movie’s protagonist, Robert Šoko, drives through Bosnia, revisiting his roots. He befriends them, taking one refugee in particular, a young Afghan rapper, under his wing, inviting him to Berlin.
“When I started on this film. There was a huge problem with refugees,” concluded Kreso. “A lot of people coming, literally walking through the Balkans, taking the same route that Robert Šoko and I took almost 25 years ago.”
These days, Sergej lives in a rural corner of Holland, whose proximity to Belgium and Germany suggests a kind of “Yugoslavian vibe,” he says.
Asked whether, after nearly 30 years, he feels assimilated into Dutch society, he says:
“As a migrant and as a refugee, you always are exposed to a cacophony of voices. The voices are telling you: ‘Welcome. Stay here. Here is a safe place for you. Feel at home.’ There are, however, other voices that say: ‘When will you leave now? Why did you come here? It’s our country. The Netherlands is full.’ There are these voices and those voices. There are always movements and waves – I’m almost afraid of the next wave.”
