Gunja, Croatia
June 22, 1999After their introduction to Croatia in a mysterious ghost town, Rob and Leon head on to Gunja, a town close to the Bosnian border. There they meet up with their Bosnian field producer, Dejan Bosnjak and check out the extent of international effforts in the area.
Rob's
Journal
We arrive in Gunja late at night under steady rain. The following day it continues to rain all day long. Since it is so wet, there is little else to do but prepare for our time in Brcko, which is only a kilometer away across the bridge in Bosnia.
Which isn't to say that today hasn’t been uneventful. We are staying in a room above a restaurant. After a day of living on bread and cheese, a hot meal is a welcome change. The Slavonija is apparently the best restaurant in town and all the diplomats and local officials come here to eat. Today alone I see OSCE officials, UN monitors, high level U.S. military officials and diplomatst, local police and an American newspaper journalist. It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall here because the conversations alone would fill a documentary. I listen in on a few and keep hearing the same phrase being repeated over and over again: "Brcko is the key."
By the afternoon, we finally meet with Dejan, our field producer and OSCE special assistant in Brcko. He arrives on the inaugural run of a bus line from his hometown of Trebinje in Bosnia. This has been just another example of our extremely good fortune because Dejan could not register his car in Trebinje and there was no other way he could have gotten here.
Dejan heads to Brcko on his own to find us a car and driver since we can not take out Hungarian rental car into Bosnia. This is a risk we do not want to take since we've heard that one car is stolen every day in Brcko and foreign rental cars are the thieves’ favorite. Dejan returns later with good news; not only has he found us a car, but he got it for less money then we expected. I think if Dejan ever decides to move into the film and video field permanently, he would make a great producer. So far he has delivered on every promise and has been invaluable to us.
But one final question remains: will anyone talk to us on camera? The journalist at the restaurant doesn't seem to think so. She has spent quite a bit of time in Brcko. She tells us that people will talk about their situation quite freely, but it is extremely difficult to photograph them much less videotape. It took her three months just to take one photograph of a Serb family (and this was a family that was well educated and had money). Now I am scared of frightening people away with our video camera and I’m starting to doubt if will get any stories in Brcko at all.
So will Rob and Leon manage to get any stories in
Brcko or beyond?