Comrades

Running time: N/A

Mitko Panov's Comrades is an absorbing rumination on friendship, war and the strength of spirit. A simple photograph from 1981--Mitko Panov, one of many smiling teenagers in the photograph, and his friends are a part of Yugoslavia's irony-free "Army of Peace." Panov and his comrades, like most teenage soldiers, are unconcerned about Marshal Tito or ethnicity. They orient themselves according to who among them is the unit's best musician, party animal or comedian. They are blissfully unaware of the horrors that are about to take place. Panov emigrated to New York to become a filmmaker but lost contact with his army friends over the course of Yugoslavia's bitter civil war. Comrades finds him returning, camera in tow, to Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia in search of friends who might not have made it. His searching has a sense of urgency because there is another war on the horizon. (This film was made immediately before the U.S.-led bombing campaign over Serbia). In hope of finding his friends alive, Panov travels all over the former Yugoslavia. In a country where your house is looted and burned for being literally five feet on the wrong side of the border, where all town streets are renamed by conquering armies, Comrades gives the ultimate insider's view of war's aftermath. The story each comrade tells is a powerful reminder of the ultimate devastation the region is still suffering. --Brian Benston