The Weight of Chains

This movie really embodies what nearly every single UN commander has said about Yugoslavia: "Portraying the Serbs as evil and everybody else as good was not only counterproductive but also dishonest. According to my experience all sides were guilty but only the Serbs would admit that they were no angels while the others would insist that they were...I believe none of my successors and their forces saw anything on the scale claimed by the media." - Lt. Gen. Satish Nambiar. Head of UN forces deployed in Yugoslavia from 1992-1993.

There's retired Major General Lewis Mackenzie as well as many other former UN commanders that have said the same thing, and this film echoes that sentiment, which is such a refreshing change from the diatribe of propaganda that passed as news, and facts, on the Yugoslav civil wars.

It does so with the sarcasm of Michael Moore, and with great integrity. What Western media has ignored is that Serbs did not start the war. No claims are made about Milosevic being a saint, just that it was not what the Western media claimed it to be, the so-called "good guys" did worse things than the "bad guys". The involvement of the West in supporting and fuelling separatists in Yugoslavia cannot be ignored. With many shocking revelations, it keeps you interested from start to end. Ever wonder who really started the breakup? Who really tried to salvage it, and why? Well, you get to find out.

You will go from Western interference before the outbreak, to finding out why Croatia and Bosnia broke away illegally, to interference during, and how the people of Yugoslavia were better off without the country being ripped apart. The glamour of EU membership, so highly sought after by the former Yugoslav countries, is shown to not be what it seems to be when you're a small economy.

What will be found is how many sources are by people not affiliated with the Balkans. Canadians, Americans, people who only care about truth, and justice. This makes it that much harder to say that this film is propaganda when the sources are well researched, unbiased, and make heavy use of UN testimony, and the current story on what happened, according to the West, mostly falls on American government and PR company (Ruder Finn, Cohn & Wolfe, Gibbs & Soell, to name but a few) press releases. Everyone used propaganda, but the key difference is Milosevic never hired any PR companies for the world. The one faction that didn't do such a thing, and is it such a coincidence then that they are labelled as the bad guys? Not even Milosevic, but the whole people?

It combines a lot of what is readily known, but not readily reported in the West, with plenty of tidbits of information that is not so easily found. Even people who study the Balkans in university will be surprised at what they simply did not know before watching, or the lies that were thought of as truth.

And for what? Aside from letting the truth be known, this movie brings forth a message I dare say is just as important for the former citizens of Yugoslavia: reconcile, why they are much better off together than they could ever be alone, and why it is so. And that is what makes this film better than most, that message. Bring out the raw truth for all to see, and move on and work together. No anger, no bitterness. Something that the Balkans could learn a thing or two about. See this film.

This documentary purports to describe why Yugoslavia broke apart in the 1990's. Surprise, surprise, it was all a US Imperialist plot! Who knew?!

Actually, this documentary is not quite as simplistic as that. It turns out that the EU is also evil, as is the IMF, NATO, and anyone who can't see that a country dominated by a communist elite is so much better than a country dominated by a capitalist elite.

This documentary does provide a different point of view though and is a thought-provoking if you can stomach the absolute banality of it's completely biased pro-Serb viewpoint and the sing-song style of it's insufferably-I'm-smarter-than-you narrator

This is a Serbian documentary but anybody who watches it from the area of former Yugoslavia will learn that everything is not black and white and it never is.

Not many Croats will have the willpower to watch the whole documentary but they should not because of the part about politics before the war and war itself but for the second part that talks about economy and what has happened to us all after the wars.

Pay attention to the graph of the Yugoslavia and the debt that each country accumulated.

Shame that the author was not more neutral because many people will not see it because of it.

At the end its better to be a colony then to kill each other.

I watched the film after I read that it "... takes a critical look at the role that the US, NATO and the EU played in ... Yugoslavia." The documentary failed at doing so. On the technical side, it is a fine documentary, the wicked, dark sense of humor makes it watchable, and if you're looking for a superficial, anti-western story about Yugoslavia, I guess you can enjoy watching it. The film is probably doing great in Russia. The authors anti-western, and "pro-Serb" (more like pro-tycoon) view has, as a result, some serious flaws in the story... He used interviews with people not known to the wide audience, presenting them as "former adviser of the president", without saying the name of the president - Slobodan Milosevic, which makes all the difference. How relevant this "adviser" guy is, shows his criticism on the West allowing low-rate credits for Serbia, as an evil scheme to increase Serbian debt(?). When the privatization was mentioned, the author failed to stress the role Milosevic's era tycoons had, letting the audience think it were western companies who bought and destroyed all the factories in Serbia. The film looks like a bad compromise between producers, director(s), author... at the same time, the author is anti-war, anti-nationalist, yet he has a soft view on Serbian war crimes - barely mentions Srebrenica Massacre, says nothing about war crimes on Kosovo, and Chetnics are presented as pro-Yugoslav freedom fighters. Slobodan Milosevic is portrayed as almost an average politician. The film makes a dark spotlight on the pro-EU parties in Serbia, making it easy for an average viewer to come up with a belief that anti-EU parties are the solution, when in fact the other side is even worse than current parties in power, hence the majority of the people voted them. If the author could have made that step back, and separate himself from the Serbian daily politic, it would be an important documentary on former Yugoslavia, Serbia, and US/EU involvement... but as I said before, it totally failed. Too bad, cos US and EU politics on former Yugoslavia was completely wrong from the start, still is, and someone should definitely publish a good, and important story about that.

Pretty special, whether you are looking for hopelessly paranoid ramblings or wildly inaccurate facts (population of the EU is 1 Billion, and the Slovenes are hopelessly unhappy with their current prosperity) - you are well served by this title.

The film makers, as commented on by other reviewers, display a worrying Serbian tendency to rationalise the war without accepting even partial reponsibility. Of course it wasn't all the Serbs, or the Croats or the Bosniaks, all shared in the blame, just as the West could rightly be criticised for it's own mismanagement of the crisis. But deny even a portion of the blame to Serbia is just ridiculous.

I can understand an anti-Nato bias, a Serbian friend of mine lived two hundred yards from a Nato precision bomb on a TV station that killed his neighbour. That isn't going to endear Nato to anyone. But with delusional propaganda like this... reconciliation isn't going to be made any easier.