Original subtitles

First there were those who died before I was born. It was as if they had just left and their shadows would slip out after them under the door so recently closed the air in its path was still swirling to rest. Paul Eluard

My name Ada means island

paradise or alienation

and perhaps a distance I felt to lands my families were from

I wondered about these other lands.

especially the one that doesn’t exist.

LIVING AMONG THE DEAD

Dear grandfather

The surrealist poet Paul Eluard once wrote

“There is another world. But it is in this one.”

I believe you lived in this world.

I was born the year your country fell apart

I have no memories of you speaking of this place

Since you went to heaven

I have been searching for your lost country

Yugoslavia!

Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia!

Yugoslavia!

Few Americans know little if anything about Yugoslavia.

One reason is because not many people know where to find it.

Actually, it’s really quite simple.

Just go to Italy and make a right.

A popular misconception about Yugoslavia

is that it is a neighboring country of the Soviet Union

in actuality it borders 7 European countries

none of them being Russia.

A bigger misconception than the location though

is the country itself.

We often think of a bleak, dreary, iron-curtain country

inhabited by peasants clad in nothing but bleak, dreary babushkas

which may be the case, if this is your idea of a babushka

Yugoslavia

RED STAR DIVIDED

On my birthday I visit your homeland

that now goes by another name.

[Yugoslavia] was a nice country. As soon as you finish school, you immediately get a job.

As soon as you get a job, you immediately get married.

As soon as you are married, you get an apartment

and now, only if you steal, you can buy or get the apartment.

Pumpaj!

This spring, revolution is happening here.

Freedom is finally coming

that’s why we are here.

If this country doesn't want to hear the young people in the colleges

it will listen to them on the streets.

it will listen to them on the streets.

If it doesn't allow us to vote, we will block and stop everything.

“Students space for students”

Students have taken over the city.

like this art space where Marina Abramović had her first performance.

“Pumpaj” is their rallying call

In another part of the city the government hosts a counter protest

in what used to be Marx and Engels square.

This is known as Ćaciland

but we’re not allowed in with cameras

I really don't know how to tell you, in English?

Please, don't provoke.

I don't provoke.

You made a separation between you and us with your Pumpaj

with Ustašes

with not believing in God

with burning the Bible

Okay.

GOVERNMENT SPONSORED CARNIVAL

Who do you work for?

Who do you work for?

Which television?

American, come on, stand there.

For America?

American.

Oh my beautiful, come here.

Hello

This is for CNN.

This man

entered the Guinness Book of Records

because he made toasts continuously for six and a half hours

and never repeated the previous one.

Cross yourselves, brothers and sisters.

That is the only thing that can save us.

Help me, God, my Christ, my beloved God, educate the Serbs to worship God.

I raise this toast to the health of every border guard, priest or officer who defends my homeland so that no one touches it.

But in the midst of this potentially revolutionary moment

I am drawn to the unconscious of the city

the ghosts of revolutions past

I said, I don't give any reports for that agency you work for.

No agency.

No, no, no, no.

You work for the English service, for the American one?

That’s what you said, that you live in America.

And what? Turn it off.

Turn it off and then we’ll talk.

I find fragments of your country

in the ruins of cultural monuments

Simone Weil once wrote, “the destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.”

Dear Deda

I have found something else you left behind

your daughter Blanka

whose photo you kept hidden in your sock drawer for 50 years.

Our relationship was a big misunderstanding

Big.

Because we are similar.

And fighting, fighting.

You know?

When you are similar

it’s the same mentality

the same temperment

Blanka resembles you more than any of your children.

Sometimes when I’m looking at her I can only see you

She becomes my guide into the past

and she is full of the stories you never told.

Yugoslavia was a beautiful country

beautiful country

believe me

Human being was the priority

during socialism

in former Yugoslavia

believe me

You can write it down.

It’s the center of my story.

We could go in every country without passport

We didn’t pay taxes.

You know every divorce is expensive

It was like a big divorce

We got divorced

divided.

So why do you think it broke up

if people didn’t want it?

CIA!

You know

that name?

But when capitalism came

came many many garbage from outside

“Corruption kills! SNS killers!”

How much do you cost? How much do you cost? How much do you cost?

THE WORD REVOLUTION COMES FROM REVOLVERE, MEANING TO TURN AROUND OR TO RETURN TO

Blanka tells me about a dream she had where you are wearing all white.

the dream reminds me of a photograph

You are in Angola

right after the revolution

You went as an agricultural engineer for the Yugoslav company Progres

An MPLA member stated: “there are clearly three distinguished groups of countries in regard to the way they treat us:

the Western, the socialist and Yugoslavia”.

He added that Yugoslavia deserved this “special and privileged place”

because the aid it provided came unconditioned.

“There is another world. But it is in this one.”

A group from the city of Subotica claims to be the fourth Yugoslavia

They carry a baton to Tito’s grave every year for his birthday.

We started carrying it after Yugoslavia broke up.

We will not let them erase our country with an eraser.

Subotica's Yugoslavia.

I’m not going to the graves

even to my mother’s grave I’m not going

to visit Tito’s grave and mothers grave, no

It’s not good for me.

I loved Tito since I was a kid.

With Tito, we lived, worked, and traveled everywhere in the world.

You could have visited the whole world with a red passport.

All the countries. With a red passport, all borders were open, and welcomed you with open arms.

That time will never happen again when we live, work, or travel.

You could sleep in a meadow.

Nobody asked you, who you are, where you are, and where you are from.

Did Dragoljub mention me as a daughter

ever

to you?

Did he mention me?

I don’t remember.

When did you find out you had a sister?

Teenager.

I was a teenager

How did you find out?

I think out of nowhere my father says you know

I think we were in Sutomore and he mentioned something about our sister

It was like a bombshell.

We were like what we have a sister?

We have a sister, okay.

PSYCHIC ROOTS

In 1948 Yugoslavia was ousted from the cominform for diverging from the Soviet Union and forging its own path to socialism.

In the following years, supporters of Stalin were persecuted.

You were one of them.

Jeca, its you?

Listen, we have a client from America

but she came in shorts.

ARCHIVES OF YUGOSLAVIA

“In this document we are providing you with the overview of excluded members of the communist party...”

“Freedom to the people!”

“Death to fascism”

“Data for penalized members, KP, regarding the Resolution Informbureau”

THE PUNISHED

“He did not agree on any issue with the position of the KPJ Central Committee.

He declared that he trusted Stalin and Molotov more than the KPJ Central Committee.”

“...His work is weaker... he hangs out with reactionary elements. He has a hesitant attitude...”

Prison may have changed you

but it didn’t change your beliefs.

When you moved to the US at sixty

to help care for my brothers and me

they refused to give you citizenship

because you were a communist.

NEW COMMUNIST PARTY of yugoslavia (KPJ) HQ

I become an honorary member of your party

they are also hoping for a revolution

a return to something lost

Dear comrade, she wants us to discuss party stuff.

Well, I am a sincere member of the communists.

We don't want anything to the capitalists, just for them to be normal.

And they can't be normal.

I don't know. That's what Mayakovsky says.

The capitalist will make an elephant out of a fly and later sell the ivory to the people.

Or what Marx says, the capitalist would, if he could, try to sell us the rope with which we would hang him.

Greed.

I travel to your birthplace in the south of Serbia.

Life here exists only in stories of the past.

Grandma, this is your great-granddaughter.

Your son’s [grand] daughter.

Your Struja.

Grandma Borka

According to man in the village this house was built during the Ottoman Empire

I find myself here in the rubble of your childhood home.

I’m two or three years old

A postcard addressed to a relative I never knew

and a country I will never know

Perhaps I was digging for a feeling

to feel the possibility of another world

even if only through its ashes.

FILM BY ADA RAJKOVIć assistant editor: nikola stojanović MUSIC: MANJA RISTIć THANK YOU RAJKOVIć FAMILY XIAOLU GUO VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY CENTER BELGRADE