The First World War is associated in people’s minds with the millions who died on the Western Front. In the Balkans, however, war was not waged in the trenches; it passed through towns and villages, radically changing people’s lives. Through rare film archives and expert testimonies, the documentary War & Peace in the Balkans depicts the dramatic changes that swept through the lives of the inhabitants of the Balkans, from Bosnia and Serbia to Bulgaria, Greece and the Ottoman Empire. One hundred years after World War I, the film gives a landmark reassessment of the region’s history, by overcoming national narratives of the war and reaching a common history of the war from a regional ‘Balkan’ perspective.
The film can be licenced for school use here or ordered on DVD from Anemon Productions. An educational programme for children is available for free download in 5 languages from here.
In addition to the documentary, War and Peace in the Balkans consists of a touring exhibition that was in Athens, Thessaloniki, Budapest, Sarajevo and Belgrade. For more information visit the website. The project was produced by Anemon Productions for the Goethe-Institut Athen.
