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Dir: Boris Malagurski
By Charlie Roberson
The Weight of Chains is a 2010 documentary from Serbian national Boris Malagurski examining the break-up of Yugoslavia and the bloody conflicts that came with it. It uses a mixture of archive footage, narration and interviews to create a vivid picture of the crisis and it pulls no punches in giving its opinion on exactly how such a tragedy came about.
Boris places the blame squarely on the United States and other Western powers who used economics and covert methods to engineer disaster in Yugoslavia. His passion and his anger are both obvious throughout, with his voiceover sometimes bordering on bitter mockery. It’s a documentary aiming less for neutrality and more to be an exposé of the regions untold story. From the Pentagon to NATO, no-one escapes unscathed. This is especially ironic as many people in the countries responsible for the grief in Yugoslavia now know very little about what happened there.
The most affecting thing about the film is just how much it makes you sympathise with the ordinary civilians who had their lives torn apart by war. At the start we see Yugoslavia as a proud country with a bright future ahead but the film goes on to show crisis after crisis being heaped upon the Serbs, Croats and Bosnians who had once counted each other as neighbours. In one particularly touching scene we see footage of the village of Vrhbarje in Bosnia where peace accords setting arbitrary boundaries forced the community’s Muslim population to leave, even though there had never been any quarrel between them and the Serbs who lived alongside them.
It is this focus on the humanity of the situation that elevates The Weight of Chains. Many personal and interesting touches appear throughout the film, from the Serbian man who lost his life while saving a Muslim from being murdered in the street to the cheerful but propagandistic music that emerged from the fighting.
It’s not a perfect documentary. It’s a little overlong, the choice of music is questionable at times and the narration is sometimes intrusive, distracting from the raw emotion of the events themselves, but The Weight of Chains still makes for a compelling watch and is a must-see for anyone looking to grow their understanding of this tragic story. If funding is found, a sequel will be released to continue the story of this “˜Serbian Michael Moore’.
