Maja Weiss

The Road of Fraternity and Unity

directed by:	Maja Weiss
producer country:	Slovenia
production year:	1999
duration:	104 min
sound engineer:	Damijan Kunej
camera:	Maja Weiss
edited by:	Roman Sedmak
music by:	Various
produced by:	BELA Film – Ida Weiss
distributed by:	RTV Slovenia – Suzana Prosenc
co-produced by:	RTV Slovenia, financial support by the Soros Documentary Fund, New York

Awards

Slovenian Film Festival – best documentary in 1999, Film Video Monitor, Gorica 1999 – Darko Bratina Award, VIKTOR – Slovenian Media Award, IDFA – International Documentary Film Festival, Amsterdam 1999 – officially nominated for the Silver Wolf Award

Maja Weiss is one of the most recognized Slovenian film makers. As early as during her studies at the Film Academy in Ljubljana her films received international awards and were often shown. Among other awards, her first feature film "Border Keeper" won the Manfred Salzgeber Award as the most innovative European film at the Berlinale 2002, and was officially nominated for the Fassbinder Award rewarded for the best European feature film in 2002. She is a member of the European Film Academy.

Film plot

"The Road of Fraternity and Unity" is a personal film, a journal, shot with a digital video camera in the former Yugoslavia, the area of today's newly created countries such as Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Serbia and Montenegro. This is a journey from the Vardar River to the Triglav Mountain, from the Djerdap Gorge to the Adriatic Sea, alluding to the title of one of the most popular songs in former Yugoslavia. The interviews were recorded on the Ljubljana-Zagreb highway, and Belgrade-Skopje highway; the road designated as B51, formerly called The Road of Fraternity and Unity, turned into a road of war and hell. The film deals with different ways of interpreting the terms ´fraternity´ and ´unity´ in the former Yugoslavia and what they meant in 1999 when many communication channels in this part of Europe were cut off or became less intensive.