From Yu to Me
The internet domain .yu belonged to a country that no longer exists, and this film traces what happened to it. Archival footage and interviews reconstruct the history of Yugoslavia's national domain, from its registration in the days before the country's breakup through the years it kept functioning, oddly, as a piece of infrastructure that outlived the state it named. The film follows the administrators and engineers who ran the registry and the women among them whose work has gone largely uncredited in standard tech histories, using their recollections to rebuild a bureaucratic story that turns out to be a political one: who controls a namespace when the nation behind it splinters into Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and the rest. Interview subjects describe the day-to-day mechanics of running servers and processing registrations against a backdrop of war and sanctions. The result reads less as a technology documentary than as a study of how identity and infrastructure tangle together when a country dissolves but its address on the internet does not.