
The Weight of Chains
Yugoslavia's violent breakup in the 1990s is the subject here, but director Boris Malagurski's real target is the role outside powers played in it. The film moves through interviews with historians, politicians, and journalists to argue that Western governments and institutions, from the IMF to NATO, had a hand in dismantling the country long before the wars made headlines. Archival news footage of the Yugoslav wars sits alongside present-day interviews examining how privatization, debt, and foreign loans hollowed out the Yugoslav economy in the 1980s, setting the stage for the ethnic conflicts that followed. NATO's 1999 bombing campaign over Kosovo gets particular attention, framed as the culmination of a longer strategy rather than an isolated humanitarian intervention. The film gives space to Serbian perspectives that Western media largely left out at the time, including accounts of NATO airstrikes on civilian targets. It is an argumentative film with a clear thesis, not a neutral survey, and it wants viewers to reconsider the standard narrative of the Yugoslav wars as ethnic hatred alone.