The Balkans

Before the Rain

Before the Rain (1994) is Milcho Manchevski’s debut feature: a non-linear Macedonian drama structured in three interlocking parts — WORDS, FACES, PICTURES — that begin and end at the same moment. Shot by Manuel Teran and scored by Anastasia, it traces cycles of silence, misrecognition, and reprisal across Macedonia and London. Its formal rigour and ethical austerity have made it a touchstone of post-Yugoslav cinema — and a test of how much meaning a film can hold without explanation.

Innocence Unprotected

Dušan Makavejev’s Innocence Unprotected (1968) is a Yugoslav documentary essay built around fragments of Dragoljub Aleksić’s unreleased 1942 film of the same name. Makavejev expands the material with wartime newsreels, interviews with surviving cast, and subtle visual interventions — tinting, selective colouring — to explore how amateur art endures under political pressure. Neither satire nor homage, it treats innocence as a cultural condition worth preserving, not excusing. The film won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at Berlin in 1968 and is now recognised as cultural heritage in Serbia.

Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator

Dušan Makavejev’s 1967 Yugoslav film uses the relationship between a Hungarian switchboard operator and a Sandžak Muslim sanitation inspector to examine how desire, ethnicity, and state authority operate in everyday life. Shot in Belgrade by Avala Film, it intercuts domestic scenes with clinical monologues and a parallel murder investigation, refusing psychological explanation in favour of structural observation. Its power lies in restraint: flat cinematography, sparse sound, and an ending that repeats rather than resolves.

Man Is Not a Bird

Dušan Makavejev’s 1965 debut follows two parallel lives in industrial Yugoslavia: an engineer’s brief affair with a hairdresser, and a miner’s string of domestic and legal mishaps. Shot with unadorned realism by Tomislav Pinter and scored sparingly by Petar Bergamo, the film treats both stories with equal, unsentimental attention. Its power lies in restraint — in glances, silences, and the quiet friction between expectation and desire — not in plot or polemic.

The Forgiveness of Blood

Set in rural Albania, The Forgiveness of Blood follows a brother and sister whose lives fracture after their father kills a neighbour in a land dispute governed by the Kanun, a customary code that demands revenge and confines men to their homes. Seventeen-year-old Nik is trapped indoors; fourteen-year-old Rudina quits school to run the family bread route. Shot in natural light with restrained performances and minimal dialogue, the film observes how ancient law interfaces with mobile phones, internet dreams, and adolescent longing — not as clash, but as quiet, daily recalibration.

Srebrenica massacre

Bosnian Serb forces under General Ratko Mladić overran the UN-declared safe area of Srebrenica in July 1995, killing more than eight thousand Bosniak men and boys over an eleven-day span while roughly 370 lightly armed Dutch peacekeepers stood unable to stop them, and forcibly displacing a further 25,000 to 30,000 Bosniak women and children. Both the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2004 and the International Court of Justice in 2007 ruled that the killings constituted genocide, the first such legal finding in Europe since the Second World War, and Mladić himself was convicted of genocide in 2017 alongside Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadžić. Nearly seven thousand victims had been identified through DNA analysis by 2020, and the United Nations designated 11 July as an annual day of international commemoration in 2024.

Bosnian War

When Bosnia and Herzegovina voted for independence in 1992, its Serb population rejected the result and, backed by Serbia, fought a three-year war against Bosniak and Croat forces that killed over 100,000 people and displaced 2.2 million more. The siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre became its defining atrocities, and the war ended only after NATO air strikes and American-brokered negotiations produced the Dayton Accords in late 1995.

Dayton Agreement

Negotiated at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in November 1995 after intense American-led shuttle diplomacy, the Dayton Agreement ended the Bosnian War by dividing the country into two semi-autonomous entities under a complex power-sharing constitution. Scholars credit it with successfully stopping the fighting, but criticise its entrenchment of the ethnic partition it was meant to overcome, an assessment sharpened by the loss of original signed copies from both Serbian and Bosnian archives in the years since.

Breakup of Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia, a federation of six republics held together for thirty-five years partly by Josip Broz Tito's authority, began unravelling after his death in 1980 amid mounting foreign debt, unemployment and the rise of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia. Slovenia and Croatia declared independence on 25 June 1991, followed by Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the wars that followed over the next decade killed an estimated 130,000 to 140,000 people and displaced more than four million, ending the country historians still argue over how to explain.

Kosovo War

Kosovo Albanians' decade of failed non-violent resistance to Serbian rule gave way after 1996 to armed insurgency by the Kosovo Liberation Army, provoking a Serbian counter-campaign of expulsion and killing that NATO answered in March 1999 with an air campaign lacking Security Council backing. The war displaced hundreds of thousands and left casualty figures on both sides that historians still cannot fully reconcile.

Pljeskavica

Apple strudel

Ajvar

Banitsa

Ćevapi

Çılbır

Shopska salad