Örecomm Open Seminar:
Videoletters – Mediating Reconciliation

This Örecomm Open Seminar takes place on Saturday 9 February 2013, 12–15 hrs at Malmö University, K3, Radiostationen, Ö. Varvsgatan 11 C. Please register your participacion below.

The seminar will also be streamed live here on orecomm.net.

Dutch film-makers Eric van den Broek and Katarina Rejger had made several documentary films about the aftermath of the Balkan wars of the 1990’s, when they embarked on an extraordinary project called “Videoletters”, designed to further reconciliation among people from the former Yugoslavia who had once been friends and who had been separated and even alienated by the bloody nationalist conflict. 

The idea was simple: someone who had lost touch with, say, a childhood friend or a lifelong neighbour from a different ethnic group was invited to record a message. The directors then traced and showed the video letter to the “lost” friend, who was usually eager to reply. In most cases, the exchange resulted in an emotional reunion. Rather than revisiting horrors, the project seeks to demonstrate that reconciliation is possible, starting with individuals for whom ethnic differences were unimportant – many former Yugoslavs are themselves of mixed extraction – until the conflicts convulsed their lives.

Some of these video letters have been broadcast by television stations in each of the seven nations that were once Yugoslavia – Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzogovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Macedonia. For more information see Videoletters project factsheet.

Eric van den Broek and Katarina Rejger have developed the multimedia tool and applied it in Rwanda as well. They have received the Nestor Almendros Award for Courage in Filmmaking, from Human Rights Watch International.