Waterfront is a documentary film that explores the contested history of urbanization in Belgrade. A collaboration between the urban historian, Miloš Jovanović, and the Belgrade-based art collective, KURS, made up of Miloš Miletić and Mirjana Radovanović, the film uses the controversial Belgrade Waterfront (Beograd na vodi) project to examine themes of urban transformation, dispossession, and resistance. Belgrade Waterfront is an urban development project led by the Serbian government in cooperation with the Abu Dhabi-based real estate firm, Eagle Hills. Since it began in 2014, the project has been beset with controversy. In addition to concerns over corruption, Belgrade residents have been angered by how the development will disrupt local lifestyles and the overall aesthetics of the city. These frustrations led to the formation of Don't Let Belgrade Drown (Ne davimo Beograd), a grassroots movement that opposes the waterfront project and demands a more democratic process of urban renewal.
Waterfront uses the controversies surrounding the new development to critically reflect on discourses of progress, modernity, and Europe in the Balkans. It situates the contemporary articulation of these discourses in a longer history of the region's urbanization and integration into global capitalism. The film toggles back and forth between the 2010s and the middle decades of the nineteenth century, as the principality of Serbia began to extricate itself from the Ottoman empire. Leveraging the historical archive in this way, it draws out the parallels between these two periods, suggesting the deeper, longue durée processes that have shaped urban space on Europe's southeast periphery.
The film is organized around four chapters. The first chapter, “Europe,” traces the ways urban development in Belgrade has historically been bound up with elite notions of Europeanization. To the minds of nineteenth century rulers, bureaucrats, and engineers, liberation from the “Ottoman yoke” implied the transformation of their city from a provincial town of muddy streets and chaotic marketplaces into a clean and orderly European capital. This transformation implied the removal of the inhabitants and the destruction of their homes and property, themes explored in film's second chapter, “Dispossession.” The filmmakers scoured the city archives to uncover historical accounts of the violent uprooting of urban populations in the nineteenth century. These historical records are complimented by interviews with the victims of Belgrade's current transformation: the small business owners, pensioners, migrants, and urban poor who have experienced the—oftentimes equally violent—coercion of the post-socialist elite.
These populations have not, however, been passive in the face of their dispossession. As the third chapter, “Struggle,” illustrates, Belgrade's urban transformation has been vigorously contested in both the past and the present. In the nineteenth century, the city's waterfront was the site of intense labor disputes, as workers on the docks or in the neighboring brick factories challenged their exploitation. Today the echoes of these struggles resonate in the mass protests against the forced resettlement of Roma communities or the destruction of inner city squats in which migrants from the Middle East once took refuge. Waterfront documents how these struggles have been interwoven with the efforts of Don't Let Belgrade Drown to halt the Belgrade Waterfront project.
In its concluding chapter, “A Flash of Memory,” the film reflects on the historical substrata on which the Belgrade Waterfront is being built. Beneath the new shining structures of glass and steel, in the mud of the sedimented banks of the Sava River lie the property, memories, and aspirations of Belgrade's past residents. The filmmakers present this muddy substrata as a physical embodiment of Walter Benjamin's image of history as a pile of debris, the accumulation of tragedies in need of redemption.
Waterfront is a fascinating examination of history, power, and the urban experience in the Balkans. Although the film is an unapologetic critique of the Belgrade Waterfront project and valorizes the struggles of the dispossessed, it eschews cheap sentimentality. Intimate scenes of loss or despair are often left unremarked on, presented in a cold and surgical way. At times, the film achieves an almost haunting effect; with the exception of a handful of nineteenth century labor songs, the only soundtrack is the hum of demolition work that plays in the background of most scenes, a constant reminder that the pile of debris beneath Belgrade continues to grow.
