This article originally appeared in Balkan Diskurs.
In his keynote address at the 2017 WARM Festival’s “Why Remember?” Conference, artist Vladimir Miladinović asked, “How does one archive or record the details of the massacres of a state that wants to hide its massacres?” Serbian director Ognjen Glavonić attempted to do just that with his latest film, Dubina Dva (Depth Two).
Screened in Sarajevo on 30 June at Kino Meeting Point, Depth Two (2016) is Glavonić’s first feature-length documentary. Using a combination of spoken testimonies documented by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and images depicting the locations of the crimes, the film recounts a massacre of ethnic Albanians during the Kosovo War from 1998-1999 and the transfer of their bodies to a mass grave outside of Belgrade.
This experimental documentary shows no faces, has no named characters and has no narrators. Instead, formless voices carry the audience through the narrative alongside meditative scenes that are both tranquil and eerie. While we hear the Danube lap the sides of a boat, a narrator tells us with a startling memory for detail, “I noticed a crack in the rear of the truck. I saw two human feet and one arm sticking out of the crack.”
Beginning with the discovery of a freezer truck filled with the bodies of victims, the film follows their removal, transfer, and the cover-up that followed, eventually recounting the massacre as told by both a survivor and a soldier who were there that day. Civilians discovered the truck on 6 April 1999 near the Serbian town of Tekija. After exposing its contents, the interior ministry ordered the bodies be removed and the truck destroyed as it was to be kept a state secret in order to avoid inciting additional NATO airstrikes.
The 53 (mostly) in-tact corpses and three heads were transferred to Belgrade and their belongings documented: a child’s purse with a UNICEF notebook, wooden crayons, and a little doll; a comb; a gold wedding band; and, of course, the bullets found in their bodies.
The survivor—who lived by pretending she was dead after she had been shot at least four times—describes how her family was ordered from their home and fled Serbian soldiers armed with automatic rifles before ultimately being forced into a pizzeria that was then filled with grenades and rifle shots.
All told, more than 700 bodies were relocated and buried in Batajnica, a suburb of Belgrade. Discovered in 2001 and 2002, the mass graves included women, children and elderly, all civilians. Under orders not to speak about his role in burying the bodies, one perpetrator—whose voice had been distorted for his testimony—recalled being told, “Be careful or the darkness will eat you.”