CHILDREN, KOSOVO 2000

In the spring of 2000, Albanian children in Kosovska Mitrovica confess to the camera the deepest pain they have experienced in their short lives: being forced to witness their parents being brutally humiliated, tortured or killed. In some cases, children had to bury a parent themselves. The black-and-white photography, often shot with a hand-held and deliberately shaky camera, reveals the Apocalyptic reality of Kosovo today: its devastated villages and half-destroyed houses, where some of the children are forced to live, seem to come straight from a futuristic horror movie. Now and then, color Super 8 images, filmed by the children themselves, since they are the only ones that can see their world as it really is, alternate with shots of the destroyed areas. In the words of filmmaker Moldoványi: “If we really want to know something about this shameful war and its consequences because we do not want to forget this painful part of our history or let it be forgotten, to stop it from happening again, we have to look into the eyes of these children and listen to their stories.”