The Balkan Chronicle

The recent documentary movie ‘Turkish Passport’ is the unlikely story of Turkish diplomats who helped save tens of thousands of lives by issuing passports to Jews during World War II. The new documentary contains extensive research and an impressive production, which hits the right nerves, especially in these trying times.

The Holocaust might have been an accurate indicator of how low humanity could go and of the atrocities humans were capable of. Great tragedies make good stories, and the Holocaust has been an unfaltering source for storytellers for decades.

Bulgarian MEPs outraged over a Macedonian film that depicts wartime Bulgarians as fascists are calling on Enlargement Commissioner Štefan Füle to confront Skopje over the film.

MEPs Andrey Kovachev (EPP), Evgeni Kirilov (S&D) and Stanimir Ilchev (ALDE) have signed a letter, a copy of which was obtained by EurActiv, in which they state their concern over the "attempt to manipulate Balkan history" and "spread hate" on the part of the EU candidate country against its neighbours.

A temple, claimed to be the oldest temple in history, was found in the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa in 1964. Ahmet Turgut Yazman went to the city for detailed research in 2006 and produced a movie

A documentary tracking the unearthing of the oldest temple in the world is turning previously held beliefs about monotheistic religions and mainstream ideas on human history on their head, according to its director.

American filmmaker Joshua Marston knew from the beginning that making his second feature "The Forgiveness of Blood" in Albania would be a challenge. The film, which received a Silver Bear for screenwriting at the Berlin Film Festival, depicts a family feud between two neighboring families in the southeastern European country. In an effort to make the film as authentic to its locale as possible,  Marston wrote the script with Albanian Andamion Murataj and says he hired as many Albanian crew and cast members as possible. 

But in the end it wasn't enough for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which deemed the film ineligible for the foreign-language Oscar race because it had extensive participation from non-Albanians. The academy has forced the Albanian film committee to choose another film as its official choice for the foreign-language category, and it selected Bujar Alimani's "Amnesty."

The Irish Film and Television Academy (IFTA) has announced that Ireland’s submission for the Foreign Language category at the 2012 Academy Awards will be director Juanita Wilson’s As If I Am Not There, which tells the story of a woman facing the living nightmare of the 1992-1995 Bosnian War. The film is based on an acclaimed book of the same name by Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulic.

An Irish/Macedonian/Swedish co-production filmed in Macedonia in late 2009, it primarily uses the Serbo-Croat language, and was developed and produced by Irish producers James Flynn (Octagon Films) and Nathalie Lichtenthaeler (Wide Eye Films). The Irish team behind the project also includes cinematographer Tim Fleming, editor Nathan Nugent and composer Brian Crosby.

Fordson High School is a secondary school in Dearborn, Michigan. At times Dearborn has been a victim of hostility toward its Muslim community. The city has the largest concentration of Arabs outside of the Middle East.

The school and its football (American football) team is the setting for the new film "Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football".

In recent years, Fordson's team faced a range of challenges, from racial slurs hurled at them while playing to being falsely accused of being terrorists.

Ahmed Imamovic's "Belvedere" will represent Bosnia and Herzegovina in the foreign-language film Oscar race.

Imamovic's second movie was chosen over Adis Bakrac's "The Abandoned" by a committee appointed by the Balkan country's Assn. of Filmmakers.

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos' latest film, "Alps," proposes a novel, if disquieting, technique for grief counseling.

"Alps" is the name chosen to designate an ad-hoc group whose members stand in for deceased loved ones, purportedly to help the grieving through the transition. The first four sessions are free of charge.

This film was based on the best selling book written by Margaret Mazzantini, which tells a tale about a single mother who brings her 16-year-old son to Sarajevo, where his father died during the 1992-1995 war.

Oscar-winning Spanish actress Penelope Cruz arrived on Wednesday to Bosnia to shoot her new movie, a drama about the 1990s war in the Balkan country, local media reported.

Immigration in Italy is a big theme at the Venice film festival this year, with several home-grown movies taking a critical look at how the country's authorities and its people are struggling to deal with a growing wave of newcomers.

The issue could hardly be more topical in a year when tens of thousands of illegal immigrants fleeing political turmoil in North Africa and civil war in Libya have arrived in Italy and hundreds more have drowned at sea.

Watching The Whistleblower is not an easy experience. It's a bit like getting kicked in the stomach. While it's based on a true story, , it's even more unnerving to hear director Larysa Kondracki speak about how she had to tone down the remarkable turn of events to make it believable at all. Human trafficking is not an issue dealt with much in films, and when it is, it's usually more a vehicle for someone like Liam Neeson to bring a righteous reign of terror down onto a sheik's love yacht. Kondracki's story, or rather Bolkovac's is much more serious.

Born as an act of resistance when the Bosnian capital was under siege 16 years ago, Sarajevo's film festival has become a cutting-edge event where young European talent is revealed.

Organisers of the July 22-30 festival say they hope to use the gathering's growing international fame to promote young film-makers from the Balkans.

"Mr. Thierry Fremont and Mr. Gilles Jacob

We welcome the decision of the Cannes Film Festival to distance itself from the remarks of Danish film director Lars Von Trier, the man who openly sympathizes with fascism and calls himself a Nazi.

At the same time, we are puzzled by the Festival's double standards when it comes to Serbian director Emir Kusturica, a long-time supporter of war criminals from the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

During the 1992-95 seige of Sarajevo, many European intellectuals raised voices against its destruction while Emir Kusturica, a native Sarajevan, was making the movies sponsored by Serbia's President Slobodan Milosevic, the mastermind of the Balkan atrocities.

On the Green Line that separates the Cypriot city of Lefkoşa (Nicosia) into two -- the Turkish Cypriot and the Greek Cypriot sides -- a unique event that united the divided opinions of Cypriots for the first time in many decades took place over the weekend: a gala screening of director Derviş Zaim's newest film, a cinematic look at 1963's inter-communal violence that led to the current division of this Mediterranean island, which opens in Turkish theaters this Friday.

Although Bosnia and Herzegovina generates only several feature films per year, its filmmakers have gained worldwide recognition, producing award-winning movies on very low budgets. Recent examples are Oscar-winning "No Man's Land"; "Grbavica," winner of the Golden Bear award at Berlinale; and "Snow," which took awards at the Cannes Film Festival and Hamptons International Film Festival.

Most German films about immigration take a grittily realistic approach, focusing on urban tension and social problems. But one filmmaking duo of Turkish-German sisters decided to use humor to tell the story of a guest-worker family. SPIEGEL ONLINE talked to Yasemin and Nesrin Samdereli about their comedy "Almanya."

Producer Osman Sınav will make a movie about a true event from the Bosnian War (1992-1995), the script of which was penned by Almir Basovic, a lecturer at the University of Sarajevo. Sınav, accompanied by actor Ertan Sabah, met with scriptwriter Basovic in Sarejevo

The screenwriter of a newly released Turkish movie that features the story of the Mavi Marmara incident said on Wednesday that the ban of the movie in Germany is “illegal” and that the film will be screened in that country today.

Binbir Gece ("Thousand and one nights") is a Turkish television series produced by TMC Film that was originally aired by Kanal D between 2006-2009. It stars Halit Ergenç, Bergüzar Korel, Tardu Flordun and Ceyda Düvenci.

The show was also aired in Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Croatia on RTL TV, Kuwait, in Romania on Kanal D, the Republic of Macedonia on A1, Serbia on Prva TV, Greece on Macedonia TV and ANT1, Montenegro on TV Vijesti, Hayat TV and Alternativna televizija in Bosnia & Herzegovina and Slovenia on Pink SI.

“Belvedere,” a new feature film by Bosnian director Ahmed Imamovic, is the first to deal directly with the legacy of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, one of Europe’s worst atrocities since World War II.

The movie, which hits theatres in Sarajevo on Dec. 2, is named after a real-life refugee camp set up for those who survived the massacre but are searching for dead loved ones.