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KAMEN-THE STONES

KAMEN-LES PIERRES

By Florence LAZAR

Second film - Completed 2014

In the Bosnian Serb Republic, a fictional past is being constructed from the ground up. This has led to the building of imitation period churches and the demolition of houses to supply the construction site of a pseudo ancient village which is to become a cultural attraction for tourists.

- Year of production
- 2014
- Genres
- Second film, Documentary, Historical
- Countries
- FRANCE, BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
- Languages
- BOSNIAN
- Duration
- 67 mn
- Director(s)
- Florence LAZAR
- Producer(s)
- Julie PARATIAN (SISTER), Lucie CORMAN (SISTER)
- Synopsis
- In recent years in the Bosnian Serb Republic, a fictional past is being constructed from the ground up. This has led to the building of imitation period churches, the excavation of artificial archeological ruins, and the demolition of houses to supply the construction site of a pseudo ancient village in the eastern part of the country with “authentic” stones, a village, which is to become a cultural attraction for tourists.
  KAMEN, which means stone in Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian, questions the state of a post-war society that, in rewriting and falsifying its own history, is establishing new national and religious foundations on the denial and deletion of collective memory. The film includes accounts of deportees from Trebinje and Visegrad, alongside documentation of the recent remodeling of a part of the Bosnian landscape as a means of strengthening the myth of an exclusive Serbian and Orthodox heritage in the region.
  This focus on old stones is far from trivial. The act of excavating, transforming and moving stones echoes the ethnic population removals which devastated Bosnia from 1992 to 1995 and led to the raping, massive deporting and slaughtering of the Muslim Bosnian population.
  In this ravaged landscape, each and every stone must become part of the construction of a myth. “In response to this appropriation, I wish to bring to light the artless individual and political actions which rebuild a collective memory. In short, to show how a micro-society is attempting to prevent its organized obliteration.”