Dan Reed

The Valley

Film plot

"The Valley" is a far-away travel to the death valleys of Kosovo, where a mass slaughter happened in September 1998. The film records the stories of ordinary farmers and soldiers, who felt like being in the boiling kettle in the Drenica Valley during the Serbian military attack. Also, the film deals with the creation of the horrible logic of fear, hatred and killing, spiced with ancient myths. The film also reveals the mistaken belief of fighters in fear of ethnic war. "The largest part of 1998 I spent travelling by improvised roads connecting the villages with the central valley along the Drenica, which was the centre of the Albanian uprising", says Dan Reed. "I tried to catch in the film the complexity of the conflict, parallel and irreconcilable semi-truths which divide the Serbs and the Albanians in Kosovo and make them blind to the position of the other side – and also the sheer incestuous brutality of war between the neighbours".