‘Sky Above Zenica’ Director, a Ji.hlava Doc Festival Award Winner, on How a Community Mobilized to Fight for Clean Air

The small Balkan country of Bosnia and Herzegovina has faced particular energy challenges for years, complicated by corruption and ecological threats. Bosnian filmmaker Zlatko Pranjic teamed with Danish co-director Nanna Frank Moller for a troubling look at the toxic fallout of a chronic polluter, the ArcelorMittal steel plant near Zenica.

The result, the doc “The Sky Above Zenica,” won Ji.hlava Film Festival’s Testimonies section, focused on films that take on urgent contemporary issues, which this year screened docs that inform and inspire on subjects ranging from pollution to climate change by way of Nixon-era archival discoveries and advance research on insects.

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As the filmmakers put it, with the fall of the communist regime in the former Yugoslavia, “predatory capitalism invaded Bosnia and Herzegovina” and “ArcelorMittal, the largest global steel producer, shows the repulsive face of ruthless subordination to profit to the people of the Balkan state.”

As their film captures, the factory belches pollution into the sky with fumes containing toxins “at levels hundreds of times higher” than current permissible standards. Meanwhile, state and local agencies fail to act despite floods of protests.

Pranjic says they decided to follow a key protester and members of a local environmental organization over the course of several years, to draw attention to the fatal consequences of unregulated production.

“Samir Lemes, the main protagonist, is my childhood friend,” says Pranjic, “and Zenica is my home town, which I left in the middle of the Bosnian war. Twenty-five years later, I saw a Guardian article describing unprecedented pollution in the town, telling the story of a small group of activists gathered in Eko Forum and headed by professor Lemes. I proposed that Nanna join me in my return to Zenica with the intention to do the film.”

The project was daunting: the powerful steel company seemingly has strong influence in the area and has shown little interest in accommodating outsiders.

“We wanted to give voices to those who could not be heard, the people of Zenica,” Pranjic says. “We wanted to give human faces to the subjects of ‘negative statistics.’ We wanted the audience to connect with people of Zenica on a human level. At the same time, we wanted to examine the relationship between democracy and corporate power in so-called transitional societies.”

“Coming back to the town after 25 years, reconnecting with the old friends, being accepted and understanding new social and economic dynamics in interaction with new political tendencies was the biggest challenge for me.”

Moller was determined to make the doc more than an unregulated pollution story, she says.

“Right from the beginning, we wanted to portray the lives of the people in Zenica through being present with them over time. We wanted to do so in order to invite the audience into the reality of our protagonists, to connect with the story on a deeper level.”

Sustaining the project over seven years was the greatest challenge, she says. “Eko Forum’s activism involved urging the institutions in power to change their practices and attitude towards the steel corporation. The process was slow and we could not foresee the outcome of their activism but since we were working with a story in which the audience is emotionally invested in the protagonists, we needed to stay with them and follow through to the very end of their journey.”

The filmmakers also knew gaining access to the steel plant would be difficult at best.

As the audience follows Lemes, says Moller, “We wanted the camera to follow his journey and as such we would ask for permission to film wherever he would go. In the case of the steel plant we were rejected several times.”

Eventually, they came to think of the steel company as something out of Franz Kafka’s “The Castle,” says Moller, “where you cannot enter. By the end of the filming process however, we succeeded in filming a representative from the steel plant.”

Putting together the mountain of material was just as daunting, say the filmmakers.

As Moller says, “In the film, we insist on telling the story through characters and scenes happening naturally in front of the camera based on the circumstances and inner lives of the protagonists.”

Connecting their inner lives with the shifting social and geopolitical forces of the conflict “was the focal point of the editing process,” she says. “Conveying the information that you may usually read in a newspaper through dramatic scenes was the challenge and joy of working with this film.”

Raising the profile of protesters was a more achievable goal, say the filmmakers.

When they started filming, Moller says, Lemer and Eko Forum “were coming out of a period where they were part of protests around Zenica but had come to the realization that protesting may get the attention of the media and people in general, but it does not lead to actual change – at least not in their case.

The film then documents the group taking on a different approach, gathering evidence for a legal case.

The documentation has been key because, despite visible signs of serious violations of existing ecological regulations, and multiple cases of cancer among residents, the movement lacked hard data and reliable, independent information sources.

The lessons learned could have benefits for all, say the filmmakers. As Moller says, “I believe that our film can serve as an inspiration for other civic movements as to how to gather evidence for change, leading to positive results.”