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Jack, the Balkans & I

Documentary, 2008, 68 min.

In 1972, pop musician of Congolese-Belgian descent Jack Roskam goes to then Yugoslavia without having arranged anything. He marries a Croatian woman and plays as the only black member in the successful band Galija. While the country starts to fall apart, the lyrics of Galija become increasingly Serb-nationalistic. Jack is a pacifist and leaves the band. Eventually, he trades his guitar for a machinegun and joins the Croatian army.
Together with the Bosnian director Sergei Kreso, who left for Holland at the time, he tries to find the former Galija band members nearly twenty years later. The documentary road movie takes them to places where Jack used to live, where he served and the concert halls where Galija performed. The band members eventually meet up, but they do not talk about anything else they did in the past. That would be pointless and painful. Meanwhile, the director tries to find out why the war turned pacifist Jack into a soldier and himself into a refugee. In any case, Jack teaches him more about his country than Sergei ever knew.

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