Chris the Swiss

a film by Anja Kofmel

In war, the choice is not between good and bad; it is between bad and very bad.

Gaston Besson, mercenary

Thanks to the Documental del Mes programme of Filmoteca Canaria, I discover amazing films that I would otherwise never know about, let alone watch.

Shall the war correspondents take sides? And if the answer is yes, just how far can they go? While bearing some similarity to Another Day of Life (another animated documentary about another dirty war — if there ever was such a thing as “clean war”, which I doubt) Chris the Swiss is quite unlike any film I’ve ever seen. The haunting black-and-white animation story is punctuated and at the same time glued together by the “proper” documentary bits. The “Making Of” is worth watching too.

At some point in the film, Anja Kofmel and her Croatian host talk about how easy it was back in 1990s to board a train from, say, Switzerland, and simply go to Yugoslavia, at your own risk. Why, I did that myself in 1994, without much thinking, although I knew all too well that the war wasn’t over yet. (Incidentally, I was the same age as Christian Würtenberg at the time of his mysterious death.) I took a train from Trieste to Budapest through Slovenia and Croatia. I had a transit visa for Slovenia and hoped that Croatian border officers will just ignore me. No they didn’t. We had a three-quarters of an hour stop in Zagreb about five or six in the morning; I was forced to embark on a search of the police station, rather foolishly leaving my bag “with everything” on the train. The police was not far from the train station. I found it manned by a number of, well, men, all of them asleep, some at, some on the tables. The now-partially-awake policemen did not want to accept the foreign currency, so I rushed to look for bureau de change — at this hour, none was opened, but, luckily, the post office was. A sleepy woman changed my few dollars to the local legal tender. Back to the police, got the funny sticker in my passport for an equivalent of two US$; back to the train to reunite with — o miracle! — my bag. There was nobody to show my newly acquired visa though. One week later, on my way back to Italy, the Croats didn’t even bother to check if I had a visa. How annoying.