Picture Me an Enemy, Nathalie Applewhite, 2003

"Picture Me an Enemy" is a portrait of two young women from the former Yugoslavia who came to the US because of the conflicts in their homeland(s). The main goal of this documentary is to challenge stereotypes and homogenized representations of war victims, refugees, and, in the case of Tahija, Muslims as seen by host populations such as in the US. The spoken testimonies of the two women are accompanied by archival footage, maps and background information, shots of Bosnia and Croatia, and artistic clips of the two women in positive, reflective poses, creating a varied, engaging, and upbeat synthetic whole.

The two likeable and articulate women profiled here have clearly (of necessity) thought a lot about their relationships to their home communities, identities, countries, and their reception by the Americans where they now live, in Philadelphia (both are or were graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania). Nataša is from Osijek in the war-torn region of Slavonija, eastern Croatia, the child of a "mixed marriage": her father is a Serb and her mother a Croat (presumably why she is curiously identified in some of the film's promotional material as "a Serbo-Croat"). She came to the US in 1992 at the age of eighteen to be an exchange student but, as she stresses, stayed because of the war. She therefore considers herself a refugee rather than a (voluntary) immigrant. Tahija is a Bosnian Muslim, or Bosniac, from Sarajevo who spent most of the war in the besieged town and came to the US at the age of twenty-two in 1995, the final year of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. She also left to continue her education, impossible in Sarajevo at the time.

Contrary to the impression given in the film's promotional material (http://www.wmm.com/catalog/pages/c635.htm), the "enemy" of the title does not actually refer to the relationship between the two women; their narratives are kept separate, and we do not learn whether they even know each other. What's more, the two women do not come from groups that were directly opposed to one another as "enemies." In this, the promotional blurbs that present "two young women from opposite sides of the battle lines" who were "pictured to one another as longtime enemies," are somewhat misleading. Nataša's home region, in Croatia, was rent by fighting between Serbs and Croats, the major ethnic groups living there; Muslims were not involved. In Bosnia, Croats and Serbs clashed with Muslims and others who favored keeping Bosnia whole, and these three groups have pictured each other as "enemies." But these demonizing discourses were concerned with Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, not with Croats or Serbs contesting territory that lay outside those borders of Bosnia-Herzegovina. This is not the place for a detailed analysis of these conflicts, but the point is that while the two women in this film share a language and a former homeland (Yugoslavia), they were driven out by two separate conflicts with separate "battle lines," and would not likely have considered each other enemies.

These women are, however, adamant in their rejection of such demonizing logics, and it is in their articulation of what they have gone through to make sense of the conflicts and of their predicament that the film is most effective. Those familiar with the former Yugoslavia will recognize the dilemmas of people who refused to accept that ethnic others should suddenly become their enemies or that they themselves now had to primarily identify themselves by ethnicity and religion. Nataša is especially eloquent as she explains her identification with a former country, Yugoslavia, rather than with Croatia, where her home now lies, because "being just in Croatia would feel too confining." As a "mixed" person, she suddenly found she did not fit into any of the categories being carved out by ethnic nationalists and war. And she insists on her right not to be religious, in the face of nationalist elevation of religion as part of ethnonational identities. Tahija, on the other hand, discusses her religious faith, but mostly in terms of her personal feelings in coping with the war. But she identifies herself as a Bosniac out of her hope that the struggling state can remain whole and multi-ethnic. Both women speak passionately about how religion and identity were manipulated during the wars for political and economic gain. They vehemently resist the idea that the people of what was Yugoslavia should be pitted against each other as incompatibly different and instead stress the many things these people have in common. Grainy, romantic images of the women in reflective or happy moods create a dissonance with the war stories they tell, further upsetting standard images of victimhood. For some viewers, however, these juxtapositions will no doubt also seem misplaced in light of the far more serious predicaments faced by other, not so privileged, people caught in the war zones.

Asked to address the issue specifically, the two give answers to the question "who is the enemy." Nataša says this is anyone who wanted to kill her for whatever reason; Tahija singles out "the evil in people," though she goes on to say she doesn't hate Serbs, as if there were no question that there could be evil among the other ethnic groups. However, these statements are not surprising coming from educated, cosmopolitan exiles, and they do not change the reality that there are many others in the post-Yugoslav states who, though they might voice similar sentiments, behave according to the logic of separatist nationalisms or, at the very least, are forced to confront them in their everyday lives. The film thus does not explore the range of political and ethnic identities expressed by former Yugoslavs. It is more concerned with, and more effective at, challenging dominant images Americans have of refugees, war victims, Muslims, and the character of the wars in former Yugoslavia. This has been especially relevant because the latter were often portrayed as recurring conflicts of warring "tribes" with "ancient ethnic hatreds." (Tahija laments, with a latent racism common in the Balkans, having been taken for a "tribeswoman.") The two women present an apparent contrast to most Americans' images of war victims, refugees, or Muslims (in Tahija's case) in their outward appearances and behavior—they are white, friendly and upbeat, and dressed like any other graduate student at an American university. The reactions they encountered in the US therefore tell more about American views of immigrants, foreign conflicts, and cultural differences than about this particular conflict or the people caught up in it.

The film is thus most appropriate for sparking discussion of Western stereotypes of refugees and war victims. The background information on the former Yugoslavia, though clear and accessible, is perhaps too minimal, simple, and neutral to provide enough context about the region itself or its conflicts. There is (artistic) footage of the women back in Bosnia and Croatia, but the viewer is left wondering how they were received by their families and communities after having been away or even what life is like there after the wars. Yet, even in the aspect of countering dominant images, the film could have been more effective, especially for an audience of students too young to remember media coverage from the early 1990s, if it had shown typical examples of that coverage and the stereotypes perpetuated therein. It could therefore most effectively be used in the classroom together with more contextualization, either in terms of dominant media images or of the historical and cultural particulars of the region.

Finally, the film unfortunately has little to say about the issues of concern to the readers of this journal—Muslims or women. Although the film was made by a woman about two women, and although we could infer some things from the narratives offered, there is no reflection on gendered identities or experiences. The minimal information about the conflicts and the atrocities committed against civilians makes no mention of the different wartime experiences of men and women and leaves out any mention of the mass rapes for which the wars in Croatia and Bosnia became notorious, at least in feminist circles, in the early 1990s. Muslim identity is at least addressed but mostly in terms of American expectations of what a Muslim should look like—like most Bosnian Muslims, Tahija clearly does not fit the bill with her white skin, blond hair, and absence of head scarf, though we see her in another scene kneeling in prayer in proper Islamic dress. Yet even within the scope of its focus on stereotypes, the film does not address the particularities of gendered stereotypes, i.e., Tahija's experience as a Muslim woman either in Bosnia or in the US. We can only guess at whether the Americans who told Tahija she just couldn't be a Muslim based their judgements on gendered assumptions as well as on those about culture, race, ethnicity, and religion.