Syndicate: A.G. War Diaries in Wired News

["Natasa Manojlovic" <naftalija@hotmail.com>]

Wired News has a piece on AG and his War Diary.
One Man's Belgrade Diary
by Michael Stroud   12.May.99.PDT
http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/19634.html

Text of the article is below:
One Man's Belgrade Diary
by Michael Stroud

3:00 a.m.  12.May.99.PDT
A 34-year-old Serbian filmmaker has opened his diary about life in the war
zone to hundreds of thousands of Internet users all over the world.
Identified online by his initials to help protect him from reprisals, A.G.
has used text, digitized video, and audio files to describe the 
frustration,
fear, and occasional humor of war.

"The diary I write, as well as films my friends and me make now, is an
attempt to picture an inside seeing of war, and it's not intended to find
the 'ultimate truth'," he wrote in an email message, part of an interview
via email with Wired News last week. "Believe me, my life in Belgrade now 
is
only [the] life of a normal person in an abnormal situation, and nothing
more spectacular than this."

The filmmaker's postings on WebCinema, iFilm, and elsewhere on the Net 
have
provoked a firestorm of discussion, sympathy, and controversy.

Some of A.G.'s colleagues have accused him of trying to divert attention
from the atrocities Serbians have committed in Kosovo. Most, however, are
agape at the intensely personal war diaries and film clips that, in the
predigital era, would not have surfaced until after the fighting ended, if
at all.

"It's something that could only have occurred over the Internet," said
WebCinema director Jonathan Sarno, who has known A.G. for several years
through the Serbian filmmaker's affiliation with WebCinema, a worldwide
affiliation of about 2,000 filmmakers.

Moreover, said Sarno, "He has decided to let everybody read [the diaries] 
at
a time when he's in great jeopardy. For the first time in history, he has 
a
distribution medium."

It's a medium limited by the intrusions of war. With electricity failing 
and
the police confiscating some of his workplace computers, A.G. has had to
write when he could from friends' PCs, often at strange hours of the 
night.
The film files, too large to be transmitted digitally across Serbia's
hobbled phone lines, were sent across the border to Hungary and then 
emailed
to Sarno in New York.

"I tell NATO and Serbian leadership, 'Plague upon both your houses,'" A.G.
wrote in one diary entry.

He has harsh words for both sides in the conflict: for the US planes that
bomb the Serbs, for the US flour that feeds them when they become 
refugees,
and for the cafe owner who covers over the Coca-Cola emblems in his store
with red paper to curry favor with a totalitarian government.

"He has a pretty youthful belief that what is happening around him [can 
be]
artistically articulated," said Zoran Amar, a Yugoslavian video engineer 
who
met A.G. in Belgrade shortly after the war began. Amar now lives in New
York.

Sarno is well aware of the risks A.G. is taking. "I tell him, 'You could
become a famous person, or you could be killed.' It's a very, very 
volatile
situation over there, and nobody knows how it's going to play out."

A.G., too, acknowledges the possibilities in his diary, recounting how a
friend decided "to compose a song which will be a hit, and thus people 
could
remember me when I get killed in this war."

But in an email interview, A.G. discounted the chances that his films 
could
cause him difficulties with the Serbian government.

"What could be dangerous is my [written] war diary, with thoughts and
attitudes sometimes harshly confronted to the official opinion here," A.G.
said in a message. "But I think our 'Web police' has more important things
to do than to deal with my attitudes.... Anyway, I don't feel relaxed when
thinking about 'what if.'"

Beyond posting A.G.'s diary and short films on the Web, Sarno has promoted
the material to a wider audience, enlisting an American actor to read the
written diaries with an Eastern European accent for posting on the site 
and
submitting several of A.G.'s works to the Lower East Side Film Festival,
which will take place in New York on 12 May.

"Sometimes, I feel that I'm an opportunist in that I'm taking advantage of
someone else's situation," Sarno said. But, as a filmmaker himself, he 
feels
compelled to tell "a really good story."

Members of the WebCinema mailing list -- which is used, among other 
things,
for trading tips on photo techniques or on where to get a good digital
camcorder -- found themselves debating whether A.G. deserved to be heard.

"We haven't heard anything about his emotions regarding the hundreds of
burnt and now nonexistent villages in Kosovo, tortured [by Serb police]
Kosovonians, hundreds of thousands of refugees, etc." wrote filmmaker Karl
Lohninger, who compared A.G. to a German filmmaker during the Nazi
atrocities.

A.G. expressed "empathy and respect for the sufferings of the Kosovo
people," in his emailed response. He claimed to have several Kosovo 
Albanian
friends, but refused to descend into the "binary thinking" that divides 
the
people on opposite sides of the conflict into "ones and zeroes," good and
evil.

"I don't see any sense in writing about [Kosovo] in my diary, because it's
not part of my experience," A.G. added. "Maybe you can call me selfish 
when
I think about my ass when being bombed, but I'd be a liar if I write about
anything else, and I think each honest diary-writer is to do the same."

War Diaries by A.G. can be seen on
http://www.webcinema.org/war_diaries


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