WATERMELONS
film by Melina Koljevic and Stefan Statnic
length 30 minutes
genre drama
The trip of a young illegal immigrant from Afghanistan abruptly ends after the smugglers kick him out of the truck, leaving him in the middle of a country that he never knew existed, in the middle of a war he has never heard about, among the people who cannot imagine a worse enemy than a Muslim.
SYNOPSIS
CINEVISION WORKSHOP
Two men, Morad (25), refugee from Afghanistan, and Bratislav (60), Bosnian Serb and watermelon seller, meet each other by accident in the mid-1990s in the territory of war-captured Bosnia. Despite the language barriers and different cultural and ethnic background and despite the age difference, they essentially understand each other. In a short period of time, Morad and Bratislav find themselves in the situation to save each other’s lives. Bratislav wants to help Morad find the way to Vienna, and Morad will try to save Bratislav’s life after he steps on a landmine. Their relationship instantly establishes the world in which it becomes clear that it takes only some emphatic concern for another person to make people each other’s friends and peace a natural state of affairs. In parallel with the harmonious relationship between Morad and Bratislav, which develops on the basis of mutual understanding and natural empathy, we are introduced to an entirely opposite, parallel world in which nourishing the animosity and resistance to the unknown, unfamiliar and different provokes tragic consequences. It is the micro-world composed of three Serbian soldiers, Danilo, Rambo and Pavle, who are watching over the checkpoint in the vicinity of a Serbian village. Although they speak the same language and share common ethnic background, the three of them generate discord not only within their group but also towards anybody who may intrude from outside. They focus their fear and prejudice on Morad, a foreigner whose foreignness marks him a priori as an enemy, and who
cannot even for a second, before he is judged and persecuted, be considered and perceived just as another human being. When Morad shows up at the check-point in Bratislav’s van, trying to communicate that Bratislav is wounded by a landmine, nobody gives him a chance to speak and Pavle, who in fact is Bratislav’s grandson, shoots Morad out of fear, causing his gandson’s death at the same time. The gross misunderstanding ignited by the fear and prejudice causes Pavle, Bratislav’s grandson, to commit an act of hubris, and Morad and Bratislav himself become innocent victims of that hubris. Realizing what he has done, Pavle, through an ironical and tragic twist of his own situation becomes in a certain way another victim in this story.