An Artistic Challenge to the Culture of Forgetting in Serbia: Audiovisual Discontinuity in Ognjen Glavonić's Depth 2

Abstract

This article examines audio-visual discontinuity in Ognjen Glavonić's 2015 documentary Depth 2 and argues that this approach to sound and screen allows the audience to engage with the difficult topic of war crimes in a novel manner in order to address a failure in cultural memory in Serbian society. The documentary explores war crimes committed against Kosovo Albanian civilians by Serbian state forces and paramilitaries in the spring of 1999. Depth 2 cinematically recontextualizes recorded testimonies of both survivors and perpetrators from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), defamiliarizing the archive by anonymizing the source material and by removing the synchrony between voice and image. The lack of concordance between voice and screen is a key aesthetic strategy through which the film comments on pressing ethical, political, and historical issues in Serbian society.

The testimony of Shyhrete Berisha begins twenty-eight minutes into Ognjen Glavonić's 2016 documentary Dubina 2 (Depth 2). Over the course of half an hour, she recounts her harrowing experience of a grisly massacre of civilians in her village of Suharekë/Suva Reka in Kosovo.¹ In March 1999, the Kosovo Albanian residents of this ethnically mixed locale were attacked by Serbian state forces and local Kosovo Serb paramilitaries.² Berisha was among those Albanian villagers who were targeted, a group that also included her children, extended family, and many neighbors. They were ordered to gather in a local pizzeria by Serb soldiers, who then attacked the restaurant with rifle fire and grenades, killing most of those present.

Berisha's own testimony is a calm and matter-of-fact retelling, even as the violence she experiences escalates and intensifies. She conveys how, after the massacre in the pizzeria, she is put in a truck along with the bodies of those killed in the attack. She finds herself in a horrifying situation: badly wounded and presumed dead, she is en route to a mass grave of uncertain location, in total darkness, surrounded by the dead bodies of her children, family members, and neighbors. She nevertheless manages to make a deduction about her situation by listening to a conversation between the truck driver and his mother: the brief exchange is sufficient for her to identify that the driver is a Serbian neighbor, someone with whom Berisha's family had grown up. The way she learns these details is significant: Berisha comes to understand who is involved and culpable through sound. This moment is emblematic of the documentary as a whole because it is via the voice that the viewer learns, infers, and sorts through evidence.

Specifically, the voices of victims, perpetrators, and witnesses, as well as numerous accessories to this crime, are the means through which the viewer pieces together the details of the massacre. Their accounts are all from recorded testimonies provided to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (hereafter ICTY).³ In a departure from documentary convention, the content of these narratives is almost never depicted nor represented visually in the film, nor are any of the speakers shown on screen.⁴ Instead, Glavonić's camera sweeps over open landscapes: rivers, villages, and towns, as well as in-between spaces, including abandoned buildings and industrial sites. These places are presented entirely anonymously, without explicit identification or any contextual support. The relationship between audio and video is one of non-correspondence, ambiguity, and tension.

The central characteristic of Depth 2's cinematic landscape, writes Pavle Levi, is “visual absence” manifesting in “sequences [characterized by] the prolonged absence of any human activity.”⁵ The function of the voice in relation to these emptied landscapes, notes Branislav Dimitrijević, is to convey “the visually missing event” and to “guide the observer.”⁶ But we might reasonably ask: guide toward what? Through an examination of Glavonić's use of audio-visual discontinuity and how the (audio recordings of) witness accounts are placed within that broader arrangement, we can begin to answer that question, and thereby gain a better understanding of both the film and its political commentary. An analysis of the documentary's use of voice and landscape—its aesthetic strategy—is essential to any understanding of its social and political meaning.

This article focuses on how Depth 2 recontexualizes witness testimonies from the ICTY, employing audio-visual discontinuity to defamiliarize the content and to distance the film from conventional documentary tropes. These aesthetic strategies allow the audience to engage with this difficult subject matter in an unfamiliar manner. Glavonić thereby invites the audience to co-participate in constructing the film's meaning, in an approach to filmmaking he calls sa-učešće. This aesthetic strategy helps the film address a failure in cultural memory in contemporary Serbian society, specifically regarding the atrocities and war crimes of the 1990s. The role of the Serbian state and affiliated paramilitaries and their culpability in these crimes remain highly contentious topics in the country and wider region. Glavonić's film confronts the rupture between the orchestrated criminal actions of the Serbian state, and the absence of nearly any public knowledge and acknowledgment of those crimes in Serbia today.⁷ By reinterpreting the ICTY archive, and encouraging the audience to participate in that process of interpretation, Depth 2 both critiques and provides a corrective to this failure.

In analyzing audio-visual discontinuity in the documentary, I pay particular attention to how Depth 2 prompts viewers to engage in “acousmatic” listening. This neologism, developed by Michel Chion, describes the experience of listening to sound “that is heard without its cause or source being seen.”⁸ A voice which is not attached to a body on screen creates a number of unexpected cinematic effects: it can affect the film's narrative, suspense, and plotting, but it can also modify the relations of power between a film's voices and its on-screen characters, since an off-screen voice is associated with ubiquity, panopticism, omniscience, and omnipotence.⁹

Through an analysis of the disembodied voices of the perpetrators, and a consideration of how their accounts are presented in the audio-visual dynamic as a whole, I intend to show some of the political effects of Glavonić's aesthetic choices. Depth 2 as a whole creates a feeling of estrangement, presenting the testimonies and their histories of violence in a novel manner, so as to force viewers to engage with a topic long avoided and repressed in Serbian public discourse. The documentary creates a sonic blanket of perpetrators’ voices, which suggests there was a more extensive level of societal involvement in the war crimes. Depth 2 thus makes a powerful intervention on the question of individual versus collective responsibility for war crimes, a sensitive and taboo topic in Serbia to this day. As a counterpoint to the voices of the perpetrators, Berisha's testimony forms part of the documentary's public and social acknowledgement of violence committed against Kosovo Albanian civilians. Glavonić's inclusion of her testimony is an ethical act of giving voice to a survivor and, by extension, to her community. The documentary leverages the aesthetics of its cinematic language in order to address the complex social and political repercussions of the massacre in Suharekë/Suva Reka.

Histories of violence

Understanding how Depth 2 addresses the near complete absence of public acknowledgment of Serbian war crimes in Kosovo requires some contextual knowledge of both the crimes themselves and the subsequent public conversation in Serbia. Depth 2 is centered on the 1999 massacre in Suharekë/Suva Reka, during which close to fifty Albanian civilians were killed by Serbian state forces and paramilitaries.¹⁰ The armed men were accompanied and assisted by Serbian residents of the town, often the neighbors and acquaintances of the victims. While the center of gravity in the film is Berisha's testimony describing this massacre, Glavonić is equally concerned with the broader story of the cover-up operation—code-named “Dubina 2”—that followed.¹¹ The operation involved the disposal of the murdered civilians and their transport to mass graves throughout Serbia. The largest of these graves was in Batajnica, a special police base on the outskirts of Belgrade where 704 bodies were later exhumed.

The historical events and circumstances of “Dubina 2” are well understood, and the facts of the case have been firmly established by the ICTY.¹² Between April and May 1999, the Serbian state was involved in hiding evidence of mass killings in Kosovo, removing the bodies from their initial interment sites in Kosovo, and relocating them to four mass graves across Serbia.¹³ The intent of the Serbian government was to ward off a possible ICTY war crimes investigation by moving the bodies hundreds of kilometers from the site of the massacres in Kosovo, to Serbian territory far from the conflict zone.¹⁴ According to a 2017 report from the Humanitarian Law Center (Belgrade), “the information about this action was kept secret until 2001, when the then Minister of the Interior, Dušan Mihailović, set up a working group to investigate the allegations of the existence of mass graves in Serbia containing the bodies of Albanians killed during the Kosovo conflict.”¹⁵ The initiative was the work of a new government, a democratic coalition that took power after the October 2000 revolution, when President Slobodan Milošević's government was overthrown.¹⁶ The first media accounts of the cover-up, which emerged in spring 2001, helped force the hand of the coalition government. A newspaper in eastern Serbia reported that a freezer truck with fifty bodies in the trailer had been hauled out of the Danube in early April 1999 and that officials had immediately declared it a state secret, thereby foreclosing the possibility of public knowledge.¹⁷ Following these news stories, the government tasked the Ministry of Internal Affairs with forming a working group and carrying out the subsequent investigation.¹⁸

Evidence and conclusions from this working group contributed to ICTY trials against Milošević and six Serbian politicians who held prominent ministerial positions.¹⁹ The Humanitarian Law Center would later conclude its eighty-eight-page report by emphasizing that both the President and a large number of other actors were involved in the cover-up operation:

The above-mentioned evidence shows that the operation of removing the bodies of Albanian civilians from Kosovo and their burial in clandestine mass graves in Serbia was planned at the level of the national leadership, more precisely, in the Cabinet of Slobodan Milošević, the President of the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia], and that his instructions were then enforced by the police line management—starting with the Minister of the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs, Vlajko Stojiljković, down through to the ranks below.

Evidence points to the conclusion that the highest-ranking police officers were responsible for the operational implementation of the order to hide the bodies, and that the Armed Forces of Yugoslavia also played a role in the whole operation. In addition, it is noticeable that the process of hiding the bodies of those murdered in Kosovo, the excavation of the human remains and their transport to Serbia and then their burial in mass graves, involved hundreds of direct perpetrators.²⁰

The report is clear about the extensive participation of Serbian state officials and institutions in the planning, supervision, and execution of the crimes. Out of all the trials at the Hague, only Vlastimir Đorđević (former Assistant Minister of the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs in Milošević's cabinet) received a sentence for war crimes committed against Kosovo Albanians.²¹ There is a clear discrepancy between the significant amount of people involved in the crime, as described in the report, and the small number of those who stood trial, as seen in the ICTY trial record.

The revelations in 2001 about the killing of Kosovo Albanian civilians seemed to represent a turning point in the state's relationship to criminal proceedings at the ICTY and the view in Serbian society of war crimes committed by Serb forces. Eric Gordy argues that in 2001, the conversations around the freezer truck appeared to mark “the break with the period of reflexive denial.”²² He adds that this moment, when crimes against Kosovo Albanian civilians became public knowledge, might have facilitated a more profound and painful examination of Serbia's role in war crimes and the extent of the state's responsibility for those crimes.²³ However, this promise was short-lived. Mladen Ostojić notes that media coverage of “Dubina 2” and the mass graves was sidelined soon after Milošević was transferred to the Hague in late June 2001: “the issue suddenly disappeared from the public spotlight,” which “reinforced the hypothesis that the government had unveiled the mass graves in order to justify cooperation with the ICTY and prepare public opinion for the extradition of Milošević.”²⁴ After the initial period of public shock, the prevailing attitude in Serbia toward war crimes in Kosovo “turned into relativization, and relativization to a space between silence and denial.”²⁵

Glavonić has been clear that in his research for the film, he “did not discover anything new,” and that he is “not an investigative journalist.”²⁶ All the material he collected in the course of seven years of research was available in the public domain. Glavonić learned about “Dubina 2” from a magazine article he read in 2009, when he was a film student. Yet in conversations with peers and professors around that time, he discovered that very few had heard about this case. Beyond his immediate social circles, there seemed to be broad indifference to this dark chapter of recent Serbian history.²⁷ The reasons for this are multilayered and inter-connecting, extending beyond the short-lived nature of the early coverage of “Dubina 2.” The lack of interest and awareness among the public is likely the result of decades-long attempts by the Serbian state to limit the public's knowledge of war crimes.²⁸ This is compounded by the unwillingness of most major media outlets to discuss Serbian involvement in such crimes.²⁹ A key motivating factor behind this silence is the prevailing nationalist sentiment in the country, which leads to any suggestion of Serbian culpability being treated with conspiratorial skepticism. NATO's bombing campaign against Serbia, which started in the spring of 1999, also plays an important role in this culture of silence, as it helped consolidate an already strong sense of victimhood in Serbian nationalism.³⁰ This victimhood narrative is often used to preclude any consideration of Serbia's involvement in war crimes, or to muddy the waters around questions of responsibility through suggestions of moral equivalence between NATO's actions and Serbia's own.

The bombings, which NATO framed as a humanitarian intervention aiming to peacefully resolve the conflict and establish self-governance in Kosovo, helped displace Serbian state violence against Kosovo Albanians from Serbian public knowledge and discussion.³¹ The NATO attacks encouraged Serbs to think of their country primarily as a victim of NATO military aggression, rather than a perpetrator of atrocities. Importantly, Depth 2 sidelines references to the NATO campaign in order to foreground a history that Serbian society would rather forget. By focusing on war crimes in Kosovo, Glavonić's film thus goes against the grain of the dominant Serbian public memory of 1999, or of the 1990s in general (a decade of war and interethnic violence across the former Yugoslavia).³² The references to the NATO bombing in the documentary are brief: the most recognizable is a grainy, seconds-long insert from video footage of the bombing of the Pančevo petrochemical plant and oil refinery. A similar marginalization of the NATO bombing is reflected in the film's sonic arrangement. Glavonić's documentary intentionally excludes the sensorial tropes (such as the sound of air-raid sirens and bomb explosions) that would elicit associations with the memory of NATO bombing.³³ By excluding the NATO bombing as a historical point of reference, Glavonić sets aside the simplistic narratives prevailing in Serbian society regarding the NATO attacks, where Serbia is portrayed as an entirely innocent victim of western aggression.³⁴

It is exactly this “failure in cultural memory” that Depth 2's archival filmmaking critiques so effectively.³⁵ As Hal Foster writes, an interest in this kind of refusal to remember often informs archival art, which exhibits the “will to relate, to probe a misplaced past” with an eye to drawing out lessons for the present.³⁶ Depth 2 belongs to a growing group of artworks (plays, conceptual art, film) from the former Yugoslav region that have turned to the ICTY archive for source material.³⁷ These artistic recontextualizations of the legal archive are diverse in their aesthetic modes and sensibilities, but it is undeniable that all of these artworks comment on contemporary society—whether they are incorporating reassessments of history, querying the processes of justice, or revealing the archive's (or tribunal's) blind spots. As Henry Redwood points out, the aesthetic politics of such archival artwork disrupt what has been made “sensible” for the present, a present that “renders certain knowledges ‘common sense’ whilst others are made illegitimate.”³⁸ Depth 2 is in that regard an expression of Foster's “will to relate”: the documentary confronts Serbian society and its refusal to listen to what happened in Kosovo, with the legal archive detailing exactly what happened. Moreover, Glavonić's critique and correction of this failure of memory takes place not only through the film's content but also—as discussed below—through its formal aesthetic choices.

Defamiliarization of the Archive

The reframing of the ICTY archive in Depth 2 functions as a cinematic defamiliarization of testimonial evidence. In the documentary, the ICTY archival material is transformed such that it is not easily identifiable as stemming from the trial at all. Glavonić consulted four hundred hours of testimony, itself only a small fraction of the trial's archive, and condensed them into ninety-eight minutes of film, a selection guided by his criteria that he would only include the voices of those “with first-hand experience, who touched and smelled the bodies.”³⁹ The entire documentary proceeds without identifying information, visual or otherwise, that might reveal the source of the voices the audience hears, with the ICTY trials only cited in the closing credits. Delaying disclosure of the source of the testimonies is one way for Glavonić to neutralize the evidentiary material, which would immediately become politically contentious were its origin made clear to the audience. For a Serbian public in particular, the ICTY is a highly charged topic: the tribunal does not enjoy widespread credibility in Serbia, where it is often dismissed as being institutionally biased against the Serbs, further contributing to the narrative of Serbian victimhood in public discourse.⁴⁰

The opening scene of Depth 2 is illustrative of Glavonić's rejection of the “expository mode” of documentary filmmaking.⁴¹ We see a shot of a briskly flowing river accompanied by the voice of an unidentified narrator, who speaks without the viewer being aware of when or why the man is speaking. The voice, notably, is not the kind of omniscient narrator that an audience might typically expect from a documentary about war crimes. Conventional didactic voiceover—perhaps the most recognizable and common use of a disembodied voice that speaks from off-screen—aspires to objectivity and functions to provide exposition. Pooja Rangan writes that “such a voice forcefully [draws] attention away from its own source, materiality, and corporeal particularity toward its message, earning the informal moniker ‘voice of God narration.’”⁴² The point of the voiceover in documentaries, elaborates Stella Bruzzi, is “to generalize, to offer an omniscient and detached judgment, to guide the spectator through events whilst remaining aloof from them.”⁴³ Depth 2, by contrast, employs disembodied voices who neither pretend to be objective nor provide the viewer with any kind of explanation that would facilitate their understanding.

The documentary from the very first situates the viewer in the middle of the timeline of events. “The police officer on duty informed me,” the voiceover begins, “that in the Danube river, near Tekija village, a fisherman noticed an object floating on the water, something that looked like a truck's trailer box.” The documentary then unfolds like a procedural investigation, building tension through a sequence of disturbing revelations. Even before the truck is pulled out of the river, the police diver notices human legs sticking out of the trailer. In total, fifty bodies are discovered in the truck. The viewer is unsettled, but so is the person who speaks, a factor that further differentiates him from a typical omniscient narrator. The narrator describes how, after advising the local municipality of the recovered bodies, a shipment of coffins arrives but there was no sense on how to proceed: “What could we do with only a dozen coffins? And what's with the coffins anyway? What to do with them? Where to carry them?”⁴⁴ Here, Depth 2 gives the viewer a proxy experience of how those involved came to understand and discover the many layers of the crime and its cover-up, from the killings themselves, through the transport of bodies across Kosovo and Serbia, to their disposal in mass graves. The viewer shares the initial lack of knowledge with those who experienced the events first-hand. It is specifically the formal arrangement of the film that enables this dislocation of the viewer: the lack of spoken exposition and audio-visual correspondence make it challenging for the viewer to find a foothold from which to make sense of what they see and hear.

Visually, matters are just as unclear. As the first witness speaks, sequences of a river, a muddy stretch of land, and construction work on the side of a cliff accompany the testimony. The interpretation of these images is open-ended: the images occasionally demonstrate a degree of proximity to the words (such as the shots of the river), but are most often non-referential.⁴⁵ The shot of the muddy river bank, for example, shows some tire marks in the soil, evoking a possible (but not explicit) connection with the testimonial detail about the truck careening off the road or being hauled out of the Danube. For the majority of the documentary, the landscape shots are associative and symbolic vis-à-vis the voice, creating multiple opportunities for the viewer to interpret for themselves the relationship between the two.⁴⁶

These techniques create a specific and active role for the viewer and how they relate to the film, which Glavonić calls sa-učešće (literally, co-participating). Sa-učešće is a neologistic concept of Glavonić's own making, drawing on the connotations of saučešće, meaning “sympathy” or “condolence” in Serbian. Rather than the definition of sympathy as commiseration or an expression of sorrow, the emphasis is on its definition as common feeling or a correspondence of feelings.⁴⁷ Speaking about his filmmaking in 2018, Glavonić explained his understanding of sa-učešće: “It is important for me to create the largest possible space for the active participation of the audience and to attempt to engage what is human in you, [to engage] your imagination, your feelings, your memories, your world.”⁴⁸ By co-participating in the construction of meaning in the film, the audience is invited into a possible identification with the protagonists of the cinematic world. The viewer expands and infuses what they hear with their own experiences—what Glavonić refers to as the imagination, feelings, memories, and world of the viewer.⁴⁹ One means by which this is achieved in Depth 2 is through “[the] emptiness or lack of the image.”⁵⁰ Levi notes that the emptiness of the landscapes is “a request to the viewer for active participation in the film: for supplementing, for further imagining that strategically emptied and, as such, incomplete image.”⁵¹ The absence of human figures on screen who speak is a key component of this incomplete image. It is precisely their absence that elicits the participation of the viewer, because the voices of ICTY witnesses are not tethered to a particular face, setting, or context.

This provides broad opportunity for reflection and co-participation in meaning, especially relevant for those in the Serbian public, where the issue of possible responsibility and complicity is much more controversial and polarizing. Glavonić attempts to provoke these reflections by removing an all-knowing narrator who puts forward a single, authoritative account presented in seemingly objective terms. Instead, the disembodied voices require a sorting out on the part of each individual viewer, who must consider for themselves not only the complicity of individuals who participated in the cover-up but also the social and collective reverberations of the crimes. Though there is no guarantee that the documentary will have the desired effect on the viewer, Depth 2 provides possibilities for the co-production of meaning.⁵²

Disembodied Voices and Collective Responsibility

The presence in Depth 2 of an unspecified number of voices that are heard without the speakers being seen allows Glavonić to comment on the tension between individual and collective responsibility for war crimes—a tension that permeates discussions in many post-war societies, including in the Balkans. As the film unfolds, the sense of witnessing and learning of a criminal cover-up grows, as does the number of participants who give their version of the events. Yet, by design, it is difficult to discern within the documentary the actual number of voices who provide an account of taking part. By suspending the correspondence between sound and screen, between voice and body, Depth 2 disrupts the audience's ability to attach words and actions to specific individuals.

There is, then, a complexity and ambiguity to the disembodied voice in filmmaking: it can function as all-knowing, steeped in power structures, or, alternatively, it can be used to challenge the very same. Glavonić's treatment of voice in Depth 2 leans on this tension in order to communicate ideas about state power and the perpetrators’ responsibility. This is achieved specifically through the film's formal organization around disembodied voices, which steer the viewer away from perceiving the men who took part in the cover-up as individuals, coalescing their identities into a group.

This aesthetic trope—erasing individuality through anonymity—is a means by which the film comments on collective participation and responsibility. Since Depth 2 does not identify to whom the male voices belong, and since the narration switches back and forth between individuals, it is often difficult to tell the men apart. As such, the lack of clarity as to who is speaking underscores the interchangeability of the perpetrators in the complex logistical operation of the crime. Because they are interchangeable, the voices merge into a collective. The unspecified number of men and the viewer's confusion regarding how many speak in the documentary has the effect of suggesting that a large number of people were involved, much more so than if the speakers were each individually shown on screen. The collective nature of the cover-up is confirmed in a more explicit, literal sense toward the end of the film when a forensic anthropologist who observed the excavation of the bodies at Batajnica says,

The number of people that took part in this entire operation, if you think about it, that the victims were killed somewhere, that they were loaded into trucks, that those trucks crossed a lot of miles and came to the opposite side of the country, that those trucks went to one very important site where the victims were unloaded and buried, think about it, there must've been an enormous number of people who took part in that entire operation.

This comment states outright what the aesthetic tropes of Depth 2 have subtly intimated.

By creating a sonic blanket of perpetrators’ voices, Depth 2 hints at the huge scale and collective nature of the operation, with the participation of many people in different professions (policemen, local councillors, drivers, waste workers). The film reframes the evidence of the courts, which collected said evidence to determine the guilt or innocence of individual generals and political leaders, to instead reveal the extensive network of institutions and actors who were collectively responsible for carrying out the crime and its cover-up. This contrasts with the official line of the ICTY, which sought top-level arrests to avoid passing judgment on societies at large. In the words of Theodor Meron, who presided as a judge at the Hague, “the great hope of tribunal advocates was that the individualization and decollectivization of guilt—placing responsibility on the leaders and the perpetrators of atrocities, rather than on whole communities—would help to bring about peace and reconciliation.”⁵³ To some, this is precisely where the tribunal failed in its pursuit of post-war justice: in singling out individuals, it glosses over the fact that many war crimes involved the explicit and implicit participation as well as approval of a broad swathe of institutions, political parties, criminal organizations, diaspora networks, communities, and individuals.⁵⁴ Depth 2 echoes this critique aesthetically in its treatment of voice and sound. The unattributed testimony, with no faces seen in the documentary, has the effect of making state power seem omnipotent, anywhere and everywhere.

Glavonić relies on the connotations of the voiceover as authoritative narration to stress the dominance of the political system within which the men are ideologically embedded. The hegemony of the state is especially evident in the speech patterns of the anonymous men. The men speak in an overwhelmingly obfuscating manner, their testimonies teeming with detached and bureaucratic language as they describe the cover-up. The transport of bodies is a zadatak (task), an običan posao (regular job), and a posao koji se mora završiti (job that must be done). The language neutralizes the crime by making it seem like an official and ordinary undertaking: this is especially clear in the phrase zadatak koji je važan i u interesu za državu (a task that is important and in the interest of the state), a formulation that explicitly upholds state legitimacy and authority.⁵⁵ The disembodied voices speak with the authority of the state and they make that authority apparent: the state is an abstract concept, with no embodiment, but the power the state wields is here represented through the speech patterns of the men. Glavonić's directorial decision to render these voices anonymous(ly) makes their homogeneity all the clearer: not only is it hard to tell them apart because the viewer cannot see them, but they also speak in the same bureaucratic manner, throwing into relief the workings of state power.

That this language of neutralization and obfuscation was instigated by the central state organs is confirmed toward the end of Depth 2, in a sequence in which Glavonić inserts images of documents showing that the government sanctioned and authorized this criminal undertaking. The illegal transport of bodies is signified by the terms raščišćavanje (clearing) and čišćenje teritorija (cleaning of territory). In these papers, the state creates a “clean” fiction around the crime, creating a linguistic disguise that enables police, military, and political institutions to avoid naming their brutal actions. The notion of “clearing” bears no imprint of the bodies of the killed civilians. They are doubly erased: first, killed at the hands of the Serbian state, then entirely removed from the discourse around the transport of their bodies.

Yet this impersonal violence, articulated through detached and indifferent speech, is undermined through the voice of Shyhrete Berisha, the survivor of the Suharekë/Suva Reka massacre discussed at the beginning of this article. It is Berisha who interrupts what had previously been a relatively cohesive account, eroding any sense of a “viably unified and authoritative point of command.”⁵⁶ Her words disrupt what has been heard up until that point in the documentary in a number of significant ways. She identifies herself and provides a family biography, alongside their place of residence. Glavonić's decision to include these details in the film is a strong statement about attaching identity to the victim and survivor. Berisha agreed to have her identity made public during the actual testimony at the ICTY and Glavonić emphasizes her choice. He does not provide that same emphasis for the other testimonies we hear—even though some of the perpetrators (like Božidar Protić) declined the option to remain anonymous during testimony.⁵⁷ Indeed, the majority of witnesses at the ICTY (72 percent) testified with no protective measures.⁵⁸ By emphasizing Berisha's identity, the film draws a contrast with the anonymized and interchangeable collective it has created of the other speakers. Moreover, Berisha has a doubly minoritized presence in the documentary, as a woman and an ethnic Albanian. Statistically, women accounted for just over 10 percent of all witnesses at the ICTY, which corresponds with a broader marginalization and underrepresentation of women's voices and experiences in the international legal system.⁵⁹ Her voice is a departure from the assumed power of the voices that surround her testimony in the documentary, functioning as a counterpoint in two crucial ways: Berisha gives expression to violent experiences that are gendered, and she challenges the obfuscation and neutrality of the men's speech that disguises state and intercommunal violence.

Her testimony draws attention to gendered violence: how women, alongside children and the elderly, were made entirely vulnerable, first separated from the men and subsequently hounded by Serbian state forces.⁶⁰ Glavonić gives space to Berisha's detailed testimony, which is an account of escalating violence, both verbal and physical—from insults, threats, and harassment to the gruesome end, a massacre of around forty women and children in the pizzeria. Early in her testimony, Berisha specifically expresses a fear of violation, which is directly connected to her gender:

I had 3,000 deutsche marks. I was afraid that they would undress me, the Serbian men that were there. So I pulled out the money that I had and gave it to the policeman with the gloves. Fatima [Berisha's sister-in-law] also had some money and started pulling it from her chest. But the policeman with the black gloves didn't wait. He reached for her chest and took the money himself.

The violation does not end with the massacre; it continues all the way to the moment of Berisha's utmost vulnerability and helplessness. After the pizzeria attack, as the bodies are being hauled into the truck with Berisha presumed dead, the soldiers steal two gold necklaces from her; “they thought they were more valuable than a human life,” she later recalls. Her entire testimony turns on the contrast between her lack of recourse to help or protection (Berisha and her neighbors even run barefoot out of their own homes) and the armed power—rifles, grenades, and tanks—wielded by the men carrying out the attack. It is a depiction of the generalized masculine violence of war, but at the same time it is a specific expression of gendered violence in Berisha's life and in the life of the Suharekë/Suva Reka community. While intercommunal violence operates predominantly according to a masculine logic, there are brief moments in Berisha's testimony that point to the ambigious and unaddressed positions of Serb women in Suharekë/Suva Reka. These women did not participate directly in the acts of violence but knew to varying degrees about what was happening in their own communities and with their own families. Even though these women have a marginal presence in the film itself, they are nonetheless incorporated into the broader community whose unacknowledged collective guilt the film addresses.

Berisha's words shatter the linguistic camouflage of bureaucratic speak (“a task in the interest of the state”) by naming and narrating the brutal acts that she and members of her family experienced. Her testimony is a revelation of truth, showing the terrible reality that those involved in the cover-up seek to avoid naming. Interspersed with her account is the testimony of an armed participant (most likely a local policeman) who narrates the attack from the perspective of someone sent to “secure” the Serbian position around the house where Berisha was staying.⁶¹ Speaking in a digitally altered voice (a protection of the courts), one of the first things he says is that “everything was happening very fast, like in a film.” This cinematic acceleration of the action is reflected in subsequent passages of the participant's testimony. He acknowledges the violence only obliquely, with killings taking place in the space between the moments he describes: “While I was going towards that cafe, to get alcohol [to calm down], I passed by an old woman and an old man, they were still alive. When I got back, they were dead.” This part of his account resembles a montage, a narrative excision and compression. Later in the same man's testimony, there is a similar partial elision of violence: he describes hearing a gunshot without seeing what took place, only putting together what had happened when he arrives at a café to see his commander holding a gun. Interestingly, during this moment of narration, the visuals are static with some freeze frames lasting close to a minute. We see images of a restaurant interior in total and utter ruin—more destroyed by something violent (we see shattered stone features and burnt boxes) than simply left to fall apart over time. Glavonić allows the viewer time to fully examine the frame, to take in details of the wide shot. This slow pacing and the stasis of the camera are in opposition to the verbal characterization of the man who speaks.

Providing a stark contrast to this vague and ill-defined violence is Berisha's articulation of what was done to her family, by whom, and with what consequences. Unlike the policeman's fragmented testimony, her narrative is characterized by temporal and spatial continuity. The painstaking detail of her testimony is punctuated by specific chronological markers, with references to what was happening at 5 a.m., at noon, and in the early afternoon. This emphasizes the duration of the ordeal, which to her was not like a scene from a film. Glavonić further stresses this aspect by intersecting her testimony with that of the policeman instead of letting it run uninterrupted. The documentary paces her testimony, which is one narrative means by which to communicate the length of the attack on Berisha and her community.

Berisha's testimony also brings to light how Serbian members of her own community helped carry out the attack in her once multiethnic village, thus deepening the personal stakes of the narrative. She talks about a man from her town, a Serb named Zoran who took part in the attack, who had a good command of Albanian and whom she describes as “having grown up on Albanian bread.”⁶² This is a brief detail, yet her folkloristic phrasing conveys the long-standing social bonds of a multi-ethnic community, and the depth of the betrayal of these affiliations. Nikola Matevski refers to this moment in Berisha's testimony as an example of “implied emotions” that are ultimately “allusive” yet significant because this kind of information (individual backgrounds, personal relationships) is typically “disregarded for the benefit of establishing facts” in legal testimony.⁶³

This implied emotion pertains to personal but also communal loss. A phantom voice in the documentary, Berisha's testimony is an instance of prosopopoeia, a rhetorical figure in which an absent or dead person speaks.⁶⁴ She speaks over images of a landscape from which her family and neighbors have been erased. Through the film's discontinuous audio-visual arrangement, Glavonić artistically enables a symbolic return of the disappeared voice. Her voice is heard against the backdrop of the landscape of her former life—a landscape no longer hers, since she describes leaving Kosovo for Albania. The very fact that we hear Berisha but do not see her is a constant reminder of violent and enforced disappearance—the disappearance of herself along with her community.

The Sound of Burning as an Auditory Haunting

In its final minutes, Depth 2 shifts aural and visual registers, creating a coda bracketed off from the documentary's preceding formal and rhythmic qualities. After the testimonies, the film ends with an off-screen sound of burning, accompanied by inserts of two forms of evidence: first, documents from the Serbian government relating to the cover-up and, second, personal objects recovered from the mass grave in Batajnica. The shift in the film's visual mode—from landscapes to the recovered objects—brings into focus those individuals who were killed and who cannot be given a voice, an idea that is further reflected in Glavonić's use of the phantom sound of burning, unaccompanied by any corresponding visual referent. The lack of voice gives the film's coda an allusive and symbolic quality, foregrounding sensorial experiences as a conduit of meaning that had been, up to that point, conveyed by verbal narrative.

The film's coda moves toward a portrayal of the victims who had been absent from the film up until this point. In the testimonies of the perpetrators, those who lost their lives are characterized as corpses (leševi) or routinely referred to through demonstrative pronouns (“there's no need to photograph that” where “that” indicates the bodies). Berisha's account verbally describes her children and relatives who lost their lives, but it is a heartbreaking expression of their last phrases and screams, rather than a fuller depiction of their lives and histories. At the end of Depth 2, these people are put on the screen visually in the form of their personal objects, including clothes, ID documents, drawings, and photographs recovered from the mass grave. Glavonić's camera pans across these objects slowly, initially in extreme close-up: what appear at first as artful abstractions eventually come into focus as torn, bloody, and damaged items of clothing. The objects also register the work of the human hand—particularly poignant are a school notebook and a portrait of a woman's face. At one moment, the camera lingers on one of the ID cards long enough for the name “Berisha” to become legible. These objects speak in a particular way: such belongings are “an integral part of reviving and reshaping the personality of the dead,” writes Maja Petrović-Šteger.⁶⁵ It is an ethical choice on Glavonić's part to end the film with this focus on Albanian civilians who, though voiceless, can nonetheless have their personhood and citizenship acknowledged.

The sound of burning that accompanies the images doubles the scene's emotional resonance: though these objects convey the personhood of the dead, the sound of burning brings to mind damage and destruction. Because it is an off-screen sound, it is less important for the viewer to connect the burning to a particular event than it is to engage with its connotations in the context of the difficult subject matter, as well as the political and ethical questions of the documentary. Chion's notion of “rendering” sound is useful here: to render sound is “[t]o (convey, express) the feelings associated with the situation” in a film, which is more “truthful, effective, and fitting” than actual auditory verisimilitude.⁶⁶ In other words, Depth 2 encourages the viewer to consider not so much the source of this burning but, rather, the effect and sensations “associated with the sound source.”⁶⁷ In the coda, Glavonić translates the violence described in the testimonies into a non-verbal form, making out of it an auditory haunting of all that the viewer has heard.

The unremitting sound of burning during the coda evokes all the different instances of burning brought up in the accounts of the perpetrators: the burning of the freezer truck in which the bodies were initially found, the burning of grass around a grave to disguise the work of heavy machinery (which could be picked up by satellite remote sensing), and the burning of the bodies when they were first brought to Batajnica.⁶⁸ The forensic anthropologist who observed the excavation at Batajnica testifies:

In the majority of graves, remains and traces of fire were found in the pits as well as partially burnt clothes and body parts, also suggesting that the bodies were thrown and set on fire in the pits. Remains of rubber tires were found, so it's evident that there was an attempt to burn and then bury them. I assume, when they realized that they lacked time, they started with the backfilling.⁶⁹

Played during the coda, the sound is localized as a memory of what the audience has already heard in the testimonies. The sonic motif of burning thus makes present the non-representable—yet experienced and felt—crimes and acts of violence. Along with the visual inserts of recovered evidence, the sound of burning conveys not only the initial acts of destruction—the killings—but also the subsequent attempts to destroy any evidence of them.

A Political Statement in a Culture of Disavowal

Depth 2 tackles a sequence of difficult subjects: responsibility for war crimes, the possibility of a social and public reckoning with Serbia's recent violent history, and acknowledgment of wrongdoing perpetuated by Serbian state forces against Albanian civilians in Kosovo. Recasting extensive legal evidence of the war crimes committed against these civilians, Depth 2 comments on the question of participation and guilt and further suggests to the Serbian and wider public that responsibility for war crimes is more extensive than socially acknowledged. Crucially, this commentary is made through formal cinematic techniques in addition to the film's content. Through the anonymity of a sonic arrangement that renders individual testimonies into a collective, Depth 2 subtly conveys a sense of widespread participation in extensive state-organized criminality. This approach stands in opposition to the “wholesale justice” of the ICTY, which chased only the “important kingpins.”⁷⁰ Glavonić's documentary, by contrast, does not seek to use the testimonial archive to lay blame, but rather artistically arranges the evidence in an effort to encourage societal acknowledgement of Serbian involvement, which has yet to meaningfully occur. Depth 2 is therefore oriented toward repairing the silences and breaks in collective memory. Berisha's testimony, and its central role in the documentary, plays an important part in the film's attempt to bring about such an acknowledgement. Not only is her account that of a survivor of violence, but it also throws into relief the gendered violence to which she was subject. Further, she names what is not named by the perpetrators: the fact that violence was committed by Serb members of a community against their Albanian neighbors and acquaintances, and that even those who did not take part directly knew and kept secret the killing of civilians.

Depth 2 ends cryptically: as the camera scans the objects of forensic evidence, it zeroes in on a bullet hole on a green t-shirt and zooms in toward it. The hole starts to look like a void, abstracted from its referential aspect, no longer appearing to belong to a garment. Visually, it resembles a portal that the camera lens could potentially move through, suggesting the possibility of a continuation, both of the film itself and of the social and political questions it asks. Through this image, Glavonić suggests that the story continues beyond the film's own ending. This point is borne out by the contemporary political climate in the Balkans. The issue of the missing keeps returning in the talks between Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić and successive Kosovo prime ministers. While Batajnica has been fully excavated, around 1,600 Albanians and Serbs from Kosovo remain missing, and a political stalemate between Serbia and Kosovo is stalling the disclosure of grave locations.⁷¹

As of 2024, there are no public memorials to the victims—neither at Batajnica, the other three mass graves in Serbia, nor in Kosovo. Once the bodies of the victims were excavated, the Batajnica police base became a training site for an anti-terrorist unit. There is, however, a newly built Orthodox church near the training site, which generated some controversy and protest from Kosovo Albanian families.⁷² The church, partially funded through donations and labor from the anti-terrorist unit (as well as residents of the neighborhood), was heavily criticized by human rights groups and leftist journalists in Serbia.⁷³ Officials in Kosovo see the church as an expression of aggressive Serbian nationalism, and an attempt to whitewash the recent violent history of the area, condemning the building of the church as “an act of contempt and lack of respect for Albanian victims.”⁷⁴

What remains are unofficial monuments, like the pizzeria where Berisha and others were attacked. There is now protective glass in front of the ruined restaurant, which “still smells like the bodies.”⁷⁵ A family member placed the glass there, because he could not wait for the municipality of Suharekë/Suva Reka to undertake an official act of commemoration.⁷⁶ While Depth 2 is also a type of unofficial monument, the documentary is crucially a political statement. It is a circuit breaker in a culture of disavowal; it is “ammunition,” as Glavonić says, for social change and a rejection of the stultifying and damaging nationalism of the post-conflict status quo.⁷⁷