Excerpt from a blog post by Jasmina Tesanovic on a screening of The War Tapes, a documentary by Deborah Scranton about US soldiers returning from Iraq :
My emotions as a Serbian spectator are overwhelming me: I am biased, I am pious. I cannot applaud art, the correct journalist approach to this raw patriotic matter. The Serbian soldiers scorpions too filmed their deeds as they obeyed the orders and were saving my safety back in Serbia, some ten years ago. Back then it was called patriotism, today it is called war crimes.
Did I actually see any war crime on this film? I don't know, American people will tell me that. One of the soldiers who does not want to go back to Iraq laments he cannot get attention or respect from his colleagues at work, they only want pictures and interesting stories. He loses temper because he lost their respect. He wanted to kiss the ground when he got back home alive but he was too tired, too exhausted. He cannot fight anymore, let some other guys now continue he says bitterly: "The fear and loneliness I went through…"
"No, I will never understand him", says his wife," but he will never understand me".
Link to full text, and here are previous BoingBoing posts about the work of author and filmmaker Jasmina Tesanovic.
