The Divided City of Mitrovica

Podeljeni grad Kosovska Mitrovica

Marko Grba Singh
Serbia, Kosovo | 2025 | 17 min
Swiss Premiere
Languages : Albanian, English, Serbian
Subtitles : English, French

25 years after the end of the Kosovo War, Mitrovica remains an ethnically divided city where Albanians and Serbs coexist. In a series of rigorously composed static shots, Marko Grba Singh captures a motionless youth, lost among landscapes frozen by conflict, where the brilliance of cherry blossoms accompanies the silent recitation of valedictory poems.

Twenty-five years after the Kosovo War, Mitrovica remains divided along ethnic lines, with Serbs and Albanians living in separate neighbourhoods on opposite sides of the city. Marko Grba Singh (Stars of Gaomeigu, awarded at VDR 2017) captures this reality through a minimalist approach. In a series of static shots, the Serbian filmmaker films the surrounding landscapes, where only a few ruined buildings bear the scars of the past conflict. It is Spring, and nature – indifferent to human passions – serenades the awakening of life and adorns the abandoned houses with bright splashes of colour from the blossoming cherry trees. Two voice-overs in Serbo-Croatian and Albanian, composed from poems by Aida Secic Nezirevic and Latif Berisha, silently intone farewells to maternal figures, possibly recited by the two young adults on the screen – lost in thought, their solitude and the deserted spaces around them. The Divided City of Mitrovica offers a sensitive meditation on a frozen past that will not pass, and which casts its shadow over the future.

Emmanuel Chicon

The Divided City of Mitrovica, 2025
Rampart, 2021
Tesaurus, 2020
Stars of Gaomeigu, 2017
Abdul & Hamza, 2015
If I Had It My Way I Would Never Leave, 2015
Pale, 2013
At Least We’ve Met, 2011