Phil Collins – zasto ne govorim srpski (na srpskom)   

- Can you tell us about about the background of the film?

Oftentimes my work finds its basis in a particular kind of invitation, a platform which appears skewed against the contributor but which they may bend to their will to draw specific portraits of their own history and that of their locale. zasto ne govorim srpski (na srpskom) proceeds from such a point of departure. How does language form experience? And how, when a shared language becomes taboo in a given social context, might it also create a space for a complex picture of recent conflict and personal narratives?

A few years ago I was in Prishtina with a friend from Croatia, miming at the guy behind the counter for beer. In the end my friend came out and asked ‘Imate li pivo, molim?’ There was a very complex reaction from the elderly shop assistant. He said, in Serbian, that he hadn’t spoken Serbian for such a long time. My friend from Croatia corrected him – she was from Croatia, and was actually speaking Croatian. And if his face fell a little, I don’t know. Someone else came in the shop, we made our purchase and left.

The borders between Serbia and Kosovo interest me very much. Kosovo’s recent history as part of Fr. Yugoslavia also points towards a shared cultural and linguistic history. Whilst everyone over the age of thirty would have spoken Serbo–Croat regularly, as an official language, now it is almost never heard in public amongst the Albanian majority. But my question was do you ever dream in that language? Reach for a word? And if language determines the limits of experience, and remains constitutive in its expression, how might you describe the conflict you lived through, with all of its traumatic registers and anxieties, in a language you have renounced? How would the invitation even strike you?

The film’s title zasto ne govorim srpski (na srpskom) reads ‘why I don’t speak Serbian (in Serbian)’, baldly announcing the dilemma which faced all of the contributors, among them Bujar Bukoshi (former Prime Minister) and Azem Vllasi (former Head of the Communist Party), as well as a former Serbian language teacher and her husband as they piece together the murder of their son by Serb militia in a round-up.



-Maybe this is answered already by the first question, but can you tell us why it was important for you to make this film?

I have been working quite regularly in the Balkans for the last ten years and these experiences have significantly shaped many of the ways in which I think about the production of art, particularly in film and video. The declaration of independence in Kosova in early 2008, which our shoot in Prishtina coincided with, was one of the final chapters in the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and for me it became even more urgent and necessary to somehow address that moment.

-Is the way you worked on this film similar to your other works?

The films and videos I make tend to examine particular social situations, and the underlying fantasies or dilemmas which govern them. This was the case with zasto ne govorim srpski (na srpskom) as well. Most of the time I work with a very small local crew, and work on research and pre–production with a team I find on site. This was, though, the first time I had shot on film. It was a very intense experience, and even though there is oftentimes a lyricism to the expression of the contributors, a recollection in the act, a meditation on the limits of language as they use it, the pre–production was very difficult, as we were shooting around the time that Kosova declared independence, so there was an incredible tension, joy and anxiety in the air.

I worked with a film crew from Bulgaria and we shot very fast black and white 16mm, looking towards cinéma vérité, obviously, but also Yugo–era film, particularly the so–called Yugoslav Black Wave, and directors such as Zivojin Pavlovic, Dusan Makavejev, Aleksandar Petrovic and Zelimir Zilnik.
-Would you like to say anything in particular about the film's sound and score?

I collaborated with Nick Powell, a composer and musician from London, who came out to Prishtina. We were incredibly lucky to shoot in a recording studio at Radio Television Kosova, a place with a very vivid and palpable soul. We recorded on seven mics, including the exterior and the sound booth itself. The interviewees were often mic’d up very closely, and it was important for me to hear every hesitation, the tenor of this complex gesture.
The exterior tracks became the basis for the score in the intermezzo segments, shot in the refugee camps in 1999. Since this is the historical moment most of the subjects are discussing, and since language itself and the image of Kosovo as described by international photographers seemed to be central to the conflict in so many ways, these were always structurally going to be at the heart of the piece.



- As a Turner Prize nominee, is it important for you that your film will be screened in competition at the film festival in Rotterdam?

It’s very exciting to be part of the Film Festival and to show the work outside of museum and gallery spaces. The film was originally commissioned by the Carnegie Museum of Art for a big international exhibition called Carnegie International, and it played there for nine months last year. We also screened it at Dokufest in Prizren, an outdoor festival in Kosova put together every year, but quite sadly I was shooting in Mexico the day of our screening and couldn’t be there.

I’ve been coming to the Rotterdam Festival for a few years now in different guises. In 2006 the Nederlands Fotomuseum programmed a video and photographic installation gercegin geri donusu, filmed in Istanbul with people who felt their lives had been ruined by appearing on reality TV. This was part of the work I showed at the Turner Prize, so it feels like a full circle coming back this year.

- Could you tell us something about current projects you're working on?

From Prishtina I went to Mexico City to make soy mi madre, a telenovela–format 16mm film with Mexican leading soap stars. At the moment I’m on a residency at DAAD in Berlin. I’ve been working on free fotolab, an ongoing project which we last ran in Banja Luka, in Bosnia. In it I work with a local photolab to process and develop 35mm films for free on the proviso that the customer signs a contract assigning me the universal rights to any image I choose from their photographs. It’s an incredibly intimate and sometimes overwhelming experience, studying other people’s domestic lives, and constructing a portrait of a specific place at a certain time, through the slow but inexorable death of 35mm.

I’m also researching a project on former teachers of Marxism in Former Yugoslavia. In the 1970 and 1980s Marxism was, fascinatingly, an obligatory part of the high–school curriculum. So if you taught Marxism at high school, don’t hesitate to get in touch. I need to brush up my superstructure!