Enclave

Goran Radovanovic pulls Enclave toward an inexorably tragic conclusion but pulls back to find redemption. 

Three characters find redemption. The Serbian boy Nenad survives near-death — buried under the new church bell in a burning tower — to make a new life in the multicultural Belgrade. His father Milena comes in from the embittered alcoholic’s cold to help his son make that new life.  The vengeful Albanian shepherd Baskim finds a conscience just in time to save Nenad’s life.

If the isolated, fragile Christian church bell tower expresses the vulnerability of that ethnic minority in Kosovo, four years after the war, Baskim’s role as shepherd carries both Christian and poetic connotations. The shepherd is traditionally the figure of pastoral innocence and purity, but here the Serbs’ murder of his father has turned him to violent malevolence. He even thinks of killing the priest. The shepherd is also Jesus, of course, so Baskim and the church bell frame the climax in Christian terms. 

The film details the tensions between the Albanian community and the small Serbian enclave that barely survives in the antagonistic ethos. Armoured tanks convey the citizens between the two zones’ borders. The boys are raised into their fathers’ war, until Nenad’s hunger for friendship — any friendship, even with the Albanian toughs — draws him into the Albanian “society” and Baskim discovers the error of his anger.

Writer/director Radovanovic himself plays the Serb who joins the Albanian multi-ethnic police force, placing the larger peace-keeping role ahead if his ethnic identity. His conversion is not guilt-free. By assuming the role the director emphasizes the importance of this character: subordinating ethnic commitment to the larger community and peace. That compromise Milena spurns on principle. But the ethic of the film promotes the suspension of ethnic wars in favour of rediscovering our common brotherhood. Hence the Christian framework.

     The happy ending is not a sell-out. Rather, it points a way out of the self-perpetuating rage and murders that poison and destroy the idealists in any civil war. This story of redemption is more constructive than the tragic conclusion would have been.
     The grandfathers are dying or unchangeable, the fathers are disillusioned and impotent, so to the children fall the need and hopes for peace. The Albanian urchins start as guerrilla stone throwers but graduate into guns and at least the intention to murder. Friendship with the erstwhile enemy Nenad saves them. And if Nenad didn't have a best friend to write about at the beginning, at the end he has his ex-enemy.
     Hence the interweaving of the Serbian grandfather’s death and funeral with the Albanian’s supervision of his grandson’s wedding. The cycle of community trumps the cycle of violence.