Müde Weggefährten

In five episodes, Solomun looks at the fate of refugees from former Yugoslavia. The message in his meticulous and documentary-like film is clear: even if one can escape death on the battlefield, then one still hasn’t escaped the long shadow of war.Dzimi is a deserter – one of the 300,000 – who is trying to cross the border. The train leaving for the West is full of desperate people who have lost everything, aggressive, glue-sniffing youths and hungry, screaming children. Dzimi manages to get through the border controls. The episodes that follow sketch the first morning in Germany after the illegal night-time border crossing, the chill and unfriendly refugee centre in the big city, the meeting between the new refugees and other fellow countrymen who had come much earlier as guest workers and the return years later to the country they came from.Solomun on his position as Croat-born: ‘Everyone in the Balkans who defines himself as a nationalist is my enemy. I don’t mind in the least that the film attacks nationalist feelings; I did not consciously aim my gall one way or the other. (…) It’s okay to have a language and a cultural identity, but nationality is a product you can be manipulated with.’