Reviews

The movie follows the life of a little girl, her mother and grandfather, who are living in a cabin in the middle of a dense forest in Kosovo surrounded by the menacing presence of the UCK, a criminal nationalist organization that NATO and the European Union financed and used to break Yugoslavia in pieces. The film attempts to dramatize the miserable living conditions of Kosovo Serbs. The direction is excellent, the actors are very good, the location is ideal. Unfortunately, the film ultimately misinforms and lies. And it could not be otherwise since it was financed by the European Union (Eurimages) by the instigate of the great disaster that this Balkan region suffered. We the Balkans remember the bombardment with depleted uranium and the invasion of NATO troops in Yugoslavia, through Greece. We in the Balkans know that KFOR is not an international peace keeping force, but a force of occupation and enforcement of the interests of the European Union and NATO for the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the division of the region in spheres of political influence. It's a shame that a Serbian-born director subjugates his work, which from an artistic side is excellent, to the political and ideological demands of NATO & European Union, who do not take the responsibility for the human and ecological disaster that they caused with the war in Yugoslavia and pretend that they stay there in order to save and protect Serbian children and women (!!!). I would be ashamed if I were Mr. Dusan Milic. The dead and the living compatriots of him deserve the truth.

Violence and domestic violence in particular, is a social phenomenon and not a simple matter of personal choice. Pure sentimental rubbish.

It's very sad that people that knew or admired Paul Robeson, do not provide from the very start of their narration the ultimate clue about Paul Robeson. Those friends and colleagues do not mention a simple fact that would be the best descriptive quality of this man. He was above all a great communist and everything he represents today originated from this fact. This avoidance of any clear reference on that, simply proves the self-censorship in USA today, as a result of that lack of freedom in social and political thinking and action. USA has never reinstated those thousands American Communists. There has never been an official condemnation of the political pursuits in the USA. And that was also not said in those documentaries.

Der Spiegel (Spiegel-Online)July 03, 2009 Majority of Eastern Germans Feel Life Better under Communism By Julia Bonstein

Glorification of the German Democratic Republic is on the rise two decades after the Berlin Wall fell. Young people and the better off are among those rebuffing criticism of East Germany as an "illegitimate state." In a new poll, more than half of former eastern Germans defend the GDR.

The life of Birger, a native of the state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania in northeastern Germany, could read as an all-German success story. The Berlin Wall came down when he was 10. After graduating from high school, he studied economics and business administration in Hamburg, lived in India and South Africa, and eventually got a job with a company in the western German city of Duisburg. Today Birger, 30, is planning a sailing trip in the Mediterranean. He isn't using his real name for this story, because he doesn't want it to be associated with the former East Germany, which he sees as "a label with negative connotations."

And yet Birger is sitting in a Hamburg cafe, defending the former communist country. "Most East German citizens had a nice life," he says. "I certainly don't think that it's better here." By "here," he means reunified Germany, which he subjects to questionable comparisons. "In the past there was the Stasi, and today (German Interior Minister Wolfgang) Schäuble -- or the GEZ (the fee collection center of Germany's public broadcasting institutions) -- are collecting information about us." In Birger's opinion, there is no fundamental difference between dictatorship and freedom. "The people who live on the poverty line today also lack the freedom to travel."

Birger is by no means an uneducated young man. He is aware of the spying and repression that went on in the former East Germany, and, as he says, it was "not a good thing that people couldn't leave the country and many were oppressed." He is no fan of what he characterizes as contemptible nostalgia for the former East Germany. "I haven't erected a shrine to Spreewald pickles in my house," he says, referring to a snack that was part of a the East German identity. Nevertheless, he is quick to argue with those who would criticize the place his parents called home: "You can't say that the GDR was an illegitimate state, and that everything is fine today."