Where we point our cameras is a political decision.

This August, “Fran and Verka: Or an Ordinary Day in an Abandoned Village,” a documentary film I produced in 2023, had its national premiere at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival, Dokufest, in Prizren.

During the Q&A session following the screening, an audience member asked, “How interesting did Fran and Verka (the subjects of the film) find the fact that you were filming their lives?” This question is perhaps the cornerstone of the transformative power of our efforts to diversify the voices, experiences, and faces we portray and see on screen.

It prompted me to examine my relationship with my own everyday life. I wondered: Does an ordinary person ever pause on an ordinary day to think about how special their everyday life is? Of course not. I don’t think about my life in that way, and I imagine many others feel the same. We rarely perceive our ordinary moments as stories of public interest, worthy of being shown on the big screen.

Surely, Fran and Verka must have felt the same way about their lives until one day, filmmaker Sovran Nrecaj happened to visit the church in Letnica, a village near Vërnakolla, in Vitia. The nuns in that church told him about Vërnakolla’s only inhabitants — Fran and Verka.

At first glance, Fran and Verka’s story is about perseverance: two individuals determined to live in the place they feel and know as home — a place where they were born, raised, met each other, and married. Fran and Verka don’t see their story as extraordinary: it is simply their everyday life; just as my everyday life feels ordinary to me, and perhaps yours does to you.

However, at its core, their story is that of an elderly couple from the Croatian community in Kosovo, living isolated and alone in a deserted village. Once, this village — much like Kosovo as a whole —  was home to many ethnic Croats. Until the early ‘90s approximately 9,000 ethnic Croats lived in Kosovo; today, this number has shrunk drastically.

The story of why Fran and Verka are alone today is one that needs to be seen on screen. The reasons everyone else gradually abandoned their homes — most going to Croatia — are significant both for us as a society and for the mission of documentary filmmaking: to unite and amplify the voices of those intentionally silenced.

Their story becomes indispensable in a politically troubled region like ours, where history is taught in extremes and the experiences of those who have suffered most from these extremes are deliberately left on the fringes of history and public discourse. These stories are intentionally ignored because, when brought to light, they have unifying power. In a sociopolitical environment that benefits from division, great effort is made to maintain the status quo and deny people the opportunity to learn about one another and to see themselves reflected in one another’s stories. 

Therefore, film holds power

Being part of a community is essential to humans as social and political beings. However, togetherness in a region where bricks are continually added to the walls dividing people is difficult, rendering this togetherness an act of resistance.

Films in Kosovo and the rest of the Balkans have often, too, contributed to building these walls. Filmmakers created works that prevented people from seeing themselves reflected or identifying with what was shown on screen. This led — and continues to lead — people to view their lives and pain as personal fates, rather than as experiences profoundly shaped by broader social and political circumstances, such as war.

Since the wars of the 1990s and the disintegration of Yugoslavia, many films have failed to diversify the narrative about war. Instead of shifting attention to smaller stories and making room for ordinary people who have suffered in isolation, they have turned the story of war into a simplified tale — a competition reduced to victory and defeat, to “us versus them.”

By excluding these ordinary people from cinematic attention, some filmmakers of that time have made those very individuals feel even more excluded from this shared social trauma. These films have alienated people further, contributing to the construction of the “other” as a monster and feeding narratives that formed the foundation for some of the most oppressive and bloody ideologies that arose not long ago in the former Yugoslavia.

The task of art and artists is to change this by laying bare the questions hidden by the answers, as James Baldwin put it. It must be our mission to remain curious and seek out these people and their stories. Film has a duty to dismantle the divisive wall tirelessly, brick by brick. We achieve this by creating space on screen for people who look like us, have suffered like us, and are forgotten like us.

It is essential to bring pain and misery out of the confines of the home, to problematize them socially, talk about them openly, and confront the forces that benefit from making us believe that pain and misery are merely individual circumstances.

Thus, in a broader political and cinematic context that alienates people from themselves and one another, there is nothing more important than creating a shared experience. As a result, placing small stories and “life’s little nothings” on screen and stage becomes a political act.

For Fran, Verka, and others like them

Film, whether fiction or documentary, offers a powerful platform to explore and honor small stories in their uniqueness — to spend time with both the story and the people embodying it. It offers a platform for us to stand alongside the people we film and to become a voice of memory in a landscape of forgetfulness.

Documenting these stories through film is not merely an artistic endeavor — it is a mission to preserve and respect remembrance. Taking on this mission led me to accept the invitation from writer and director Nrecaj to produce the film “Fran and Verka: Or an Ordinary Day in an Abandoned Village.”

The film follows Fran and Verka, who choose to live in Vërnakolla even after everyone else left.

The road to Vërnakolla is challenging — you need an off-road vehicle to get there. Reaching it requires determination, though not nearly as much as Fran and Verka’s determination to hold on to their home. I made this journey for the first time in March 2023, when, along with the director and cinematographer, we went to speak with Fran and Verka, to get to know them better and decide which aspects of their daily lives to portray to best capture the nuances of their story — a tale that is also Kosovo’s.

The left turn from the main road leading to Vitia takes you to a place that screams in silence. Abandoned houses line both sides of the road. Not a single light is on. It feels almost apocalyptic.

This silence grows louder after speaking with Fran and Verka. Verka does not speak Albanian, and Fran speaks it just enough to tell us that he grew up in Vërnakolla, that it was there he met Verka, with whom he is now married. With smiles, they recount the vibrancy of the village when it was home to hundreds of residents.

Nevertheless, Fran and Verka remain, to show us that sometimes the connection to what we call home and its memories are stronger than the prospect of a better life elsewhere.

The path from Fran and Verka’s house to the village church — a well-constructed but abandoned building, the only place with a source of drinking water — takes about 20–25 minutes uphill through mountainous terrain and then about the same time to go back to their home. This trek is the only means of accessing drinking water for the village’s only residents, both in their seventies.

Still, it would be unjust to say that this daily challenge is the central story of Fran and Verka or our film. Fran and Verka have chosen to stay in their home and talk about it with nostalgia and love. Their story is filled with humor and the daily reaffirmation of their will to remain, despite having had opportunities to leave, as everyone else did.

The decision to live where one feels at home should be personal and, in principle, should not constitute a story of public interest. However, when this decision becomes an act of resistance and when isolation becomes the norm, such stories must be socially problematized.

For Fran and Verka, their daily lives are not something they believe worthy of being captured by cameras — they would live as they do even without this documentary. Rather, we as a society need this documentary. We need it because it serves as a reminder that our understanding of what constitutes our society must include those living in its corners and acknowledge those who continue breathing and living, although forgotten. It serves as a lesson that history is not shaped only by grand events but especially by the lives of ordinary people who live and survive through them.

This story should help us understand the many impacts of traumatic events like the wars in Yugoslavia and the ways war disrupts lives, making what was once normal require resilience and resistance to endure.

The practice of documenting these stories through film, especially in a region where history is polarized, is a responsibility for those of us with the privilege and means to do so. We must not stop seeking out these small stories, turning our cameras and attention toward human perseverance in all its forms — toward the stories of those intentionally left at the margins.

Through film, we can create space for healing and celebrating our memories and experiences as a way to confront the exclusionary and silencing forces that have found many helping hands in Kosovo, and the Balkans.

Fortunately, this journey is not one I take alone. In the past few years, Kosovo has seen a new wave of filmmakers who seem to care less about agendas, grand narratives, and simplistic dichotomies. Instead, they are focused on creating a space where war is discussed to heal. We strive every day to unearth small stories wherever they may be and focus our cameras and society’s attention on them. This is our commitment to honoring these stories — along with our own — and all those overlooked by the collective recounting of history. 

It is in our resistance to forgetting that I find an answer to the question I was asked back in August: it is in the ordinary and seemingly uninteresting that we find the little histories without which we cannot understand the large history — or ourselves.

This article was originally written in Albanian.

Aurela Kadriu is a sociologist, researcher, cultural manager with experience as a film and theater producer. Her research on memory, socio-urbanism, gender and human rights is focused on the recent history of Kosovo and the former Yugoslavia. She is the Program Director of Qendra Multimedia — a cultural organization dealing with cultural production, focused on contemporary theater and literature.