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Serbian film 'Enclave' peeks into the lives of persecuted Christians living in Kosovo under Muslim rule

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Writer and director Gorab Radovanovic spreads awareness

Serbian filmmaker, Goran Radovanovic, provides a look into Christianity in Muslim-majority Kosovo through the film Enclave, which he wrote and directed.

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LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Radovanovic wrote and directed Enclave to tell the world about the suffering the Christian Serb minority encounters every day, stories he believes Western media has decided to ignore. 

"It's an untold story of marginal people that nobody wants to see, and this is also the absurdity that in the 21st century, people are living in such unbelievable conditions," Radovanovic said in an interview with TheBlaze, referring to Enclave's plot. He claims the world has turned its attention to the Middle East while the Christian plight in Kosovo was overlooked entirely. 
In the film, 10-year-old Nenad lives in a UN-protected enclave between the Christian and Muslim communities with his father and grandfather. Nenad is driven to school each day by NATO peacekeepers' armored vehicles, which are stoned by Kosovar Albanian boys. Nenad wants friends since he is the only male student at his school and has no friends his age.
Nenad's life is a reflection of the struggles Serb minorities in the Muslim country of Kosovo during the war, which Radovanovic personally relates to.

"My family was bombed 78 days and there were no journalists from the Western media who would cover people suffering in Belgrade or the Serbs in Kosovo. They took a side. It's not journalism; it's politics," said the filmmaker. 

He continued, saying Western media painted the Serbs as black sheep -an image he is trying to amend. Radovanovic claims journalists ignored Christian Serbs who stayed after the 1999 bombing, as well as the plight of those who chose not to return home.

In Europe, Radovanovic believes all ethnic groups can coexist and the problem with asylum-seekers' religions wouldn't be a problem if Christians there held onto their Christianity. The filmmaker claimed Europeans have forgotten their Christian values.

"We all fear the Muslim people will come to our Christian countries. They'll remain Muslims and we'll lose our identity, but it's wrong because we don't have anymore Christian identity in the Western world. We're not Christians anymore," he said. 

Radovanovic believes if the Christians in Europe were real Christians, they would have embraced the refugees without fear of losing their own identities in the future. He paralleled European Christians with Jews, who continue to be persecuted in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Though they were exiled for 2,000 years, they survived and remained strong in their faith -even without their territory.

"We lived for 500 years under Ottoman occupation and we still remained Christians," he added.
Enclave is Radovanovic's entry for the 2016 Academy Awards for foreign language films. Watch the trailer and keep an eye out for U.S. screenings here.

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