[Balkan music]
[somber music]
[car zooms past]
- And so, this is it, you know?
[Translator] "We don't remember the kid," he says.
[Gary Knight] You know, the power of a photograph
isn't the photograph itself,
it's the relationship with other people
that form with that photograph
that can really change things.
[melancholic music]
[Jeff Bowden] Six years ago, I was in Dubrovnik with my family,
and one morning, my daughter came to me and she said,
"Hey Dad, I heard there's an exhibition of photographs
"all taken by female war photographers.
Do you want to go?"
And I said, "Sure, let's go."
[melancholic music]
I just remember walking in front of it.
I described it to a friend as like a car wreck in my chest.
*
I'm not even aware of the other people around me,
I'm just fixated on this image.
- I remember exactly where it was.
You know, you turn a corner
and then the photograph is on this wall,
and he's standing in front of it
with his arms crossed and looking at it.
Seeing his reaction to that photograph, you know,
is the first time that I have ever seen him be in pain.
- A kid stuck in the middle of a war.
It was as though that boy
was really standing there, shivering.
There's a profound sense of powerlessness.
This child is trapped in a very adult world.
I just connected with some sense of that,
that being powerless or being the subject of forces
that are much larger than you.
- You hope when you're working in places like Kosovo
that what you're photographing
is something that will resonate with people outside,
that the events that are taking place need,
demand attention.
[Jeff] Two years later, Gracie gave me
a print of the photograph as a gift.
I frame it and I hang it in my office.
It was the only picture I had at home
of someone other than my family.
I saw this photograph almost every day.
And I had no idea who this boy was
or what happened to him or what he'd gone through.
After all of those quiet moments over a long period of time,
I came to a place where I wanted go find him.
I wanted to know what happened to this boy.
The day I got it, I started looking up Alexandra,
who took this.
In fact, is it on the back?
Maybe it's on the back.
Let's see.
Yeah.
So on the back, there was this certificate.
And so, from getting this to looking her up online,
I learned she died and in fact that she had
a brain aneurysm, like two and a half weeks
after we went to see the picture for the very first time.
As interested as I was at the gallery,
I'm more interested now.
[melancholic music]
First, I wanted to know more about Alexandra's photography,
so I went to Sipa Press
to see if they would let me look at her archives.
[Jeff] You think she's in there?
- I know she's in here.
Here we go.
Actually, this starts out with a quote of Alexandra herself.
"Between '91 and '99, I spent a lot of time in Yugoslavia.
"While I was visiting the country,
"a Serb spoke to me of a custom.
"It was thought wise to slip a weapon
"under the pillows of children before they fell asleep.
"And while I was listening to him,
"I imagined these parents
"and the childhood of these children,
"then their adolescence, and a whole life influenced
"by this gesture.
"Then I slipped into the sleep of these children
"and it was like a dream, a nightmare that shook
this Balkan region during the 10 years that followed."
[Mete] This is just for the negative,
black and white and color.
We have the...
- Oh wow.
Unbelievable.
You know what, his whole family may be in here.
Central Kosovo, an isolated refugee camp
in the central mountains.
Ten thousand ethnic Albanians had been driven
out of their homes by Yugoslav security forces,
October 1998.
Central Kosovo, C32.
- This one. - Right.
[Jeff] Exactly, exactly.
- The story-- this one.
Ah yeah, I remember this boy.
[Jeff] Do you really?
- Yeah.
Yeah.
What'd she say?
[melancholic music]
[Narrator] Alexandra Boulat was born in Paris in 1962.
She started out as a painter,
and eventually found her way
into the male-dominated world of war photojournalism.
She got her start on assignments in Croatia,
Kosovo, and Bosnia,
with images appearing in National Geographic, Time,
Newsweek, and Paris Match.
She joined Sipa Press when she was 29 years old.
[Jeff] I called Alexandra's mother Annie and she said,
"If you really want to know my daughter,
"you need to go meet Gary Knight.
They worked together during the war in the Balkans."
I'm on some journey because of her.
I'm just curious, what was she like?
- I first met Alex in the restaurant
of the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo.
You had terrible, sort of, Cold War-era architecture.
It was the middle of the siege of Sarajevo.
You had to dodge snipers when you left.
It was a very, very miserable place.
And I remember when Alex came in, you know,
this really sophisticated, beautiful French girl
came into the room.
It was extraordinary, you know?
It was almost as if she was lit.
- My earliest memories of Alexandra
are her trademark expression, which is "Ooh la la."
And that would introduce a sentence
but it might be ridiculous,
like "Ooh la la, we are in Kosovo, oh my God."
- We called her Bou La La,
'cause she would always say 'Ooh la la,'
and, yeah, so the nickname that she has is Bou La La.
I named my boat Bou La La after her, actually, yes.
- There was always energy around her.
She'd brighten us up in unexpected ways
and we're waiting for something
for hours and hours and hours
and wasting our time getting frustrated
and Alex was there to lighten--
lighten us up with her 'Ooh la la.'
[Ron Haviv] One of the most important things about Alex
was her dedication to her work.
She was so hardworking
and so smart about what she was doing.
We became fast friends, and we worked together quite a lot.
Then Alex, myself, and five others founded VII.
There's a lot of stuff that she and I were together for.
This...
this.
For this...
for this.
Um...
[Jeff] At that time, were you and she traveling together?
[Ron] We were.
- Okay.
Were you with her at this exact date?
- I don't know.
We would go back every day to the area
to document what was going on.
This was a very obviously important part
of the story at the time of people taking refuge.
They were being expelled from their villages
and they were hiding in the mountains.
And it's quite possible that
this kid could be over here
and she just turned around and I didn't see him
or didn't photograph him or whatever.
- Alex was very, very interested in the lives of others
and exploring the lives of others
and communicating about those lives
and challenging the way that we all think about the world.
And I think Alex had already,
even at this age and this stage in her career,
lived a pretty full life.
I mean, she'd gone through a lot of love, a lot of loss,
a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety,
a lot of pain, a lot of joy.
And all of those things would've informed her photography.
The success of the picture for me isn't the picture,
it's where the picture takes you.
For starters, she's photographing an ordinary person
doing something very ordinary at an extraordinary time.
This is somebody who is extremely anxious and concerned,
and he would've been in late 1998, or early '99,
in Kosovo, for sure.
[Jeff] I went back to War Photo Limited
to meet Wade.
I hadn't met him on our first visit to the gallery.
He told me that the original print of the boy
was still on display upstairs.
And he was exhibiting his own photos from the Balkan wars
for the very first time.
You know, so many of his images are of young people.
[melancholic music]
- So, just to know it's a story of everyday life,
this guy still insists on covering his car.
But when you see how many holes that are already in it,
I wonder why he bothers to cover it, you know?
- All in the front too.
- Yeah, I mean, it's shrapnel-ridden,
for the trash.
But yeah, he's determined to keep the rain out.
- So it's a fantastic picture.
- But, you know, the other irony is here
that you see these ladies,
they're lighting one cigarette off another,
because they don't have lighters.
Lighters ran out months ago.
Nobody has a goddamn lighter anywhere.
Matches are gone.
It's hard to find a light.
That's how low things got.
[melancholic music]
[Narrator] Many say the Yugoslav wars
were Europe's deadliest conflicts since World War II,
infamous for the war crimes of mass murder and genocide,
resulting in the deaths of 140,000 people.
The conflicts in the Balkan regions
were ignited by the collapse of communism,
with the 1991 war in Bosnia setting the stage
for widespread brutality that would take place
in Kosovo starting in 1998.
[melancholic music]
- I told Wade, "I want to find the boy in Alexandra's photo.
"Do you think it's possible?
And if it is, how do I even go about it?"
And almost immediately he said, "There's one guy you need.
You need Birol Urcan and I'll put you in touch with him."
Wow.
Take a look at this.
I'll never forget the 11-hour drive
from Dubrovnik into Kosovo.
It really felt like entering some other land.
I have no idea what's next,
and I only have one name: Birol.
- I remember the roads, you know?
Like this kind of roads.
And a very difficult time
or very interesting time of my life.
It was like every day, "Okay, I'm gonna die today?
No. Okay, we survived today."
Are we gonna see any children dead?
Or women or, you know, just like,
what do we see today in the field?
[Jeff] What is the fixer?
- It's kind of a guide, if you want,
because in the newspaper the journalist,
definitely, the reporter is the boss.
Although there may be other jealous colleagues from fixers
but I was the best one getting through the check points.
I have this ability of getting around
in difficult situations.
Can we go there, you know?
Or can we reach on time? Can we get back on time?
Can we get any pictures? How do we get there?
Well, I'll take you there.
The shortest, fastest, safest way.
- So I'm going this way?
- Yes.
- Hi, I'm Jeff.
Really, thank you for coming over here on Saturday.
- Pleasure's all mine, pleasure's all mine.
- Until the point at which I was willing
to come over here with Birol,
the only thing I had was really whatever I'd read
and just my experience.
- It was probably the moment when you
thought of yourself as a person who also has
some responsibilities that go beyond
the family and the community.
And then you said, "My God, I must be oblivious
"to the destinies of the people across the world.
This boy here reminds me that there is a world"
beyond, what, Dallas, or Texas?
But the interpretation of the photo
is contaminated with your cultural beliefs,
what you see here.
- Probably, sure.
- In a way, it's so American of you to just
go somewhere and meddle into something
that you would sometimes regret, "Why am I doing this?"
It's so, I've seen this before.
I mean...
[Birol] I've seen all kinds.
- I'm an American.
- But really, it's so American in a way that, you know,
this naivete is a privilege.
- I know.
- Naivete, altruism, humanism are privileges
of people who have safe and certain lives.
- Oh, interesting, yeah.
Well, I'd say this: I can't even process numbers.
When I hear numbers in the news,
that just makes no sense to me.
This makes utter sense to me.
- Well, Mr. Walt Whitman.
[Jeff laughs]
I do understand your entire inclination towards
this great world of emotion.
- I feel like I've been cut up in here.
[Dukagjin] We've just seen all kinds.
[Jeff laughs]
No, but really.
- You mean you've seen my kind.
I think that's what you mean.
- We've seen altruists and we've seen humanists.
We've seen terrorists.
We've seen, so experience makes the man.
[road hum]
[Jeff] Why did you say yes to this?
- It was interesting, challenging,
and brought me back to the times of war somehow,
which, in general, I don't like those times, you know?
But it was kind of a,
I still think of myself as a fixer, you know?
I kind of was proud of what I'm doing then, you know?
Wade contacted me on Facebook,
and I have kind of contact with most of the people
that I worked during the war
and I know Wade from the New York Times,
but I haven't seen him since then.
So he comes for this, you know what he says?
"There's an American guy looking for a boy
and who was in a picture taken by Alexandra Boulat."
After that, Wade sends me that picture
and my first thing in my mind is to put it on Facebook.
But then I said, "Okay, yeah, you put it on Facebook
but that's not the way to, how you solve this issue."
It may take ages to find him like that.
And then I tried to draft a plan kind of in my head,
identifying the location where the picture's been taken.
[melancholic music]
- Birol takes me west of Pristina,
into the Drenica Valley
where he thought the photograph was taken.
We started by going from school to school.
This is it right here.
We knew the boy wouldn't still be in school
because the picture had been taken 14 years ago.
We were hoping that by talking to administrators or teachers
that we would find somebody who knew the boy
or at least who knew the boy's family.
You're probably more knowledgeable about
than we are here.
I really didn't know anything about Kosovo when I showed up.
It was really my daughter who took me
to the gallery the very first time.
It was the first time I ever saw this picture of this boy.
Birol comes up with this idea of going on the news,
so he contacts KTV, the local news station
to see if they'd do some kind of story on the search,
hoping that the reach of the broadcast
will turn up some kind of clue.
[Jeff] We went to a bunch of different schools,
but we don't turn up any promising leads.
We tried to stay in that valley, within, say, 50 miles.
People would look at the picture of the boy
and disagree on where they even thought it was taken
or where to go look next.
[melancholic music]
- I combed through, I mean, probably thousands
of photographs online of children from that war,
looking for him.
One night, it was probably 2:00 in the morning
and I thought that I had found, my dad was out of town,
I thought that I had found a photograph of him dead.
- What we have gone through in the Balkans is...
has been shocking for us.
It has been invisible in terms of warfare,
but it has been extremely tragic in terms of death.
So what you got and what you saw
was a war done against civilians,
which is why we never really called it a war.
We called it massacres, we called it tragedies,
we called it...
slaughter.
The major aggressive narrative back then was led by Serbia.
For being the biggest republic in the former Yugoslavia
and the strongest one,
Serbia and the Serbian regime felt that
Yugoslavia is being destroyed
by runaway or breakaway communities,
namely, Croatians, Bosnians, and specifically Albanians.
So in the end, Serbian regime,
which was led by Slobodan Milosevic,
they decided that they could utilize
whatever the grand institutional legacy of Yugoslavia was,
and that was the army.
[mortar fires]
[somber music]
First clashes start with Slovenia.
They end that very quickly
but the war then transfers to Croatia.
[shells exploding] [somber music]
It became obvious that there's gonna be
a very specific take on this war,
which was later to be known as ethnic cleansing.
[machine gun firing]
The war then transferred to Bosnia,
which was even more complicated ethnically.
In order to produce some sort of demographic logic in Bosnia,
there had to be, they thought, massive ethnic cleansing.
[somber music]
Deportations, and whoever does not want to leave,
mass killings.
So Bosnia was one of the most horrible moments
in the Eastern European history.
And then came Kosovo.
[somber music]
[mortar fires]
[somber music]
There was another very specific take on Kosovo
which made it different from Bosnia,
and that was the ethnic cleansing
not in terms of specific enclaves
but the ethnic cleansing of the entire Kosovo.
- It was always evident when we were working in Bosnia
that Kosovo, the war in Kosovo would come,
and as that war progressed, it was evident
that Kosovo would be the endgame.
[somber music]
[Gary] There was no real good reason for that war.
It was a really mean, hubristic war in the end.
It was a war that should never have happened.
[Narrator] When Alexandra started working in Kosovo,
things were already desperate.
850,000 Kosovar Albanians were being displaced.
Some were on trains to Macedonia.
Others were in plastic tent refugee camps,
protected by the Kosovo Liberation Army
or KLA.
*
[Gary] Certainly, by the time Kosovo appeared,
I had become really angry with Milosevic.
He had this huge specter of war crimes
that were not being prosecuted.
So when I went to Kosovo, I was determined to focus
on the issue of war crimes.
So I was seeking out places where people
were tortured and killed
because that's the story that I was really working on.
My experience wasn't one of the act of conflict.
It was really the reconstruction of it and the memory of it.
So it was a different kind of nightmare.
*
- You know, the Balkans were a very
dangerous place for journalists.
At the end of that conflict,
more journalists had been killed
than any other war since World War II.
[Gary] When you are confronted by danger,
you respond to it as anybody else would, generally speaking.
You know, you feel it and it will influence
the decisions you make.
But that obviously has an impact
on the story you're trying to tell,
and the only function of a journalist in a war
is to tell the stories.
[Ron] I think this photograph is a good example
of a single frame having impact.
A friend of mine, a Serbian photographer,
got a phone call that fighting had started
just over the border in Bosnia.
And so I arrived there and then on the third
or fourth day of fighting,
Arkan, who was a paramilitary leader
of a group called the Tigers arrived.
Arkan was a very charming psychopath,
and Alex asked him if we could take a portrait of him.
When I saw Arkan again during this battle,
I reminded him that I had photographed him with a tiger
and I asked him if I could go along with his troops,
and they wound up executing unarmed civilians
in the middle of town in front of a mosque.
And while they were shooting and people were screaming,
the whole time they were telling me,
"Don't take any photographs.
Don't take any photographs."
There was a truck that had crashed
in the middle of the street
and I went and sort of stood by the truck,
which blocked the view of me from the soldiers,
and photographed the woman as she was
trying to save her husband's life,
and then they shot her.
And they brought another woman and they shot her.
And I didn't have a photograph of the soldiers
with the victims in the same frame,
and I thought it was incredibly important,
in order to be able to prove
without any doubt what was going on,
to make sure that they were in the same frame.
So I had to go in the middle of the street
and I sort of just framed the lens
to get a photograph of them walking by the bodies.
And from my left came this young kid,
very brash, he was probably about 18 or 19 at the time.
He just came into the frame
and brought his foot back as if to kick them
and I took two frames and put the camera down,
and they turned and looked at me
and I gave them a big smile
and they looked at me and smiled and then we left.
[melancholic music]
- As I was questioning this journey,
Alexandra's mom told me that her daughter believed
we have a responsibility to the things that move us.
But as I learned about the war and about what this country
went through, I hoped I wasn't just opening up old wounds
or hurting anyone.
[melancholic music]
The next morning I turn on my phone and the screen
is lit up from texts and phone calls from Birol.
The texts say, "Call me, someone has come forward."
I head straight to meet Birol, he's with the boy
who's now in his late 20's.
As I turn the corner though, the first thing he says
is no cameras.
We start talking and he seemed like he was about
the right height.
Seemed about the right shape.
I start looking at his ears.
I've been reading about how ears are a better finger print
than finger prints, they just don't change.
So as he's talking, I keep looking at his ears
and it's just not adding up and at the same time
his stories aren't connecting.
Eventually I just kind of hang my head,
and I'm thinking, "Okay, this is not the guy."
- Photos like this are signatures of a collective fate,
a collective destiny.
I was gonna say the way he looks,
is the way a person who has been through a lot looks like.
You know how Charles Bukowski says,
"By the time you get 50, everybody gets
the face he deserves,"
but if you happen to be 12 and you get the face
of a 50-year-old, then probably something has gone
badly wrong in your life.
- Yeah.
- What makes wars alike, wars in Kosovo specifically,
is that they were conducted with such ruthlessness
at the very end of the 20th century.
So, the horror of Kosovo is the fact that it was so well
documented.
To be honest with you, sometimes I wish it wasn't.
Because what you have, what you can find in archives
across the world is a nation exposed.
Everybody saw how we look when we are beaten up,
our houses burned, just dumped there in their
worst possible moments.
And there's CNN going after you asking you difficult things
such as, "How do you feel?"
How the hell do you think I feel?
My house has just been burned down.
- The fact that you stood there,
and you didn't change your expression,
you didn't flinch, you didn't uncross your arms,
you didn't try to put a smile on the face,
that's why at least at that moment in history,
that's why the world did something.
- He is exposed, he knows that you're taking a photo of him,
he may know that you're doing this so that the world knows,
but he doesn't care because everything he finds dear
has gone in flames, even his privacy.
He is going to refuse to be related to that photo.
He doesn't want to be the boy in the picture,
he wants to be someone else, just like me, and Birol,
and everybody.
We do not want to be remembered as refugees.
We want to be remembered as natural and normal contemporary
citizens of the world today.
Privacy has to have a level of amnesia.
[melancholic music]
[Jeff] The day's and nights just seemed to drag on.
I wasn't even sure if he was alive.
But then maybe he's right here, cheering on his team.
Maybe I just walked right past him without even knowing it.
Meanwhile, life in Pristina kept moving forward.
And yet the war still echoed in the street.
[somber music]
- When you look at the picture, it doesn't have a lot of action
or it doesn't have a lot of, it just single, quiet,
very story telling picture.
It was probably a quiet day, it was probably a day
where nothing was happening and she wanted to do some
pictures with the refugees.
She just went like that and she saw him.
And she saw the expression on his face,
and she took a picture.
I wouldn't.
Here's the picture that was trying to find.
I was really young, and I was really brave.
And I went to a lot of situations where I was--
I mean, I don't know how I survived basically.
Nothing happened to me.
- A lot of photographers who cover war
make it their business to photograph war as a spectacle.
And war can be a spectacle.
Where I think most of us fail,
and I include myself in this, is... we don't
deal with the mundane, the mundanity of ordinary life
in a war is in fact a spectacle in itself, right?
There's nothing exploding necessarily,
there might not be anything burning.
And there may not be guys firing guns in there
but it's the impact of war on society, and on civil life
that I think is really fundamental,
and Alex understood that very well.
And she made it her business in war, generally speaking
to photograph the impact of war on ordinary people.
[Ron] There is absolutely a way to show war without guns,
and I think that actually those photographs are so much
more important than the photograph
of the soldier with the gun.
The effect of war on civilian population, what that means
to daily life, what that means to something that
you and I and everyday person can relate to,
is like this is what happens when war comes to you.
You can't live in your home.
You can't go shopping.
You can't have your normal life, you become displaced,
you become a refugee, you lose relatives.
I mean that's the real effect of war.
And I think Alex's work without question really explores
that in a very deep and important way.
[Birol] When Milosevic took over in Kosovo,
we were desperate, repressive.
No schools, no jobs, no future, no nothing.
So when KLA showed up, most of the young people,
even old people, middle-aged people, everybody was excited.
It was like oh my god you know,
it is still one of the happiest moments of my life
because I see these guys in uniform, I'm like oh my god
this is my soldier.
[Narrator] Adem Jashari led the fight against
the Soviet establishment and was known as the father
of the Kosovo Liberation Army.
After several unsuccessful attempts to capture
or kill him, Serbian forces launched an attack
against Jashari's home in Prekaz in March of 1998.
The battle that followed resulted in the
death of 58 members of Jashari's family,
including Jashari himself, his wife, and son.
[Dukagjin] It was not the first of the actions that
were undertaken by Serbian security forces.
But it was the most shocking, it was the most brutal
and it was done with a particular zeal.
It was done as a show of, not only force,
but also as a show of absolute mercilessness.
What makes Jashari's tragedy particularly interesting,
and important is the fact that it was done
in front of the very eyes of all international media.
I was watching the entire story from a little mountain.
[Jeff] You were there?
[Dukagjin] Yes of course.
They've killed everybody, they lined them up like cattle
in the stable and opened the scene for the world to see.
I will of course never forget the day
when we went in the stable to see the corpses.
And I was there together with at least 100 TV crews,
and everybody from Reuters, to France Press,
and Serb policeman looks at you and you see in his eyes
that he is--
[Jeff] He could kill you and not feel a thing.
- And not only that, but it's as if you would see
a little doggy crying over his mom's corpse.
You are a bit saddened, but it's a dog nevertheless.
- What's the message?
- The message is 'You Albanians are the
children of the lesser god.'
'You're worth less, so killing you is not really a crime.'
But after that day, exactly a day after,
there were 200 thousand people protesting in Pristina.
This whole city was crowded.
And ever since that day, until this very day,
Kosovo Albanians became extremely aggressive.
It truly has changed our collective nature.
- It's the Alamo.
- It's literally the Alamo.
[ominous music]
[Jeff] During that time over 150 thousand refugees
were internally displaced, and another 700 thousand
were displaced outside the county.
So we were looking for a boy who's one of 150 thousand people
who'd moved into these tented camps.
The process of trying to find him seemed at some moments,
futile, no one remembered him.
[melancholic music]
[road hum]
Birol remained determined, he arranged through Dardan
for me to go on the biggest television show in Kosovo,
called Oxygen .
I could tell he was thinking,
"This is our last chance to find this boy."
- Oxygen is popular.
It's popular also in the villages.
- How many people you think are watching on any given night?
- It's the most popular for sure.
Because we do not have too many TV shows.
[Balkan music]
[applause]
[door opens]
[applause on TV]
- Hello welcome my buddy, how are you?
- Nice to be here.
- I'm here to try to locate someone who is in this book,
from a photograph that was taken in 1998.
[Jeff on TV] Yeah, I wanted to know who he is, who took it,
and that's why I'm here.
[applause]
- Thank you.
[upbeat TV show music]
- I didn't see myself, by the time Kosovo came around,
in any way shape or form as a neutral observer.
I was a participant.
And I think for a lot of the journalists of my generation
in that war we pretty much all felt the same way.
We were working with the media, and I think we produced
good journalism, fair journalism, but we were really
actors in that story as well.
Yeah we were very angry.
- I think it's a combination of understanding,
for myself, that I understand that I'm creating this document
this body of evidence for whatever is going on.
I'm contributing to sort of the historical record of humanity.
It's often thought of as a photographer
covering these situations when you're at a funeral
that you're there exploiting them and taking advantage
of them, and how dare you.
When in fact actually in these situations these funerals are,
in essence while personal, are also
for lack of a better word, political.
And I've been physically grabbed by a relative,
dragged into the room where they're grieving over the body
and told to photograph this, why else are you here?
Show the world what happened to my mother, father,
son, brother, tell them.
He or she died because of X
and I want the world to know that.
- I cried only once in the field.
[Jeff] What happened?
- I got a call in the morning it's 6:30.
It was the international Red Cross guys,
they said, "Birol, you got to rush here.
Horrible things happened in the village of Hombri."
I can not even describe it,
I started crying.
First time.
Translating and crying, you know,
I still don't want to remember this, but I did it, you know,
and I hate this.
And that's triggered the change in the war.
So that was the time after this story they brought
international observers.
And I'm proud I was part of the team that made it happen.
Probably you know, like New York Times article,
had quite an influence on that.
- Because of the work of the journalists,
the fact that we were there on the ground again in Kosovo,
photographing the same thing and putting visual pressure
and telling stories, not just the photography.
Tony Blair and President Clinton,
they started to act much faster.
[music becoming more upbeat]
[Bill Clinton] My fellow Americans, today our
armed forces joined our NATO allies in air strikes against
Serbian forces responsible for the brutality in Kosovo.
We have acted with resolve for several reasons.
We act to protect thousands of innocent people in Kosovo
from a mounting military offensive.
We act to prevent a wider war, to diffuse a powder keg
at the heart of Europe that has exploded twice before
in this century with catastrophic results.
And we act to stand united with our allies for peace.
- There's Bill Clinton.
Do people really love him here?
[Birol] Absolutely.
[Jeff] Really?
[Birol] Ya.
- How long has this statue been here?
- The statue has been here like two years now.
- Really?
- But it was named Bill Clinton Square immediately
after the war.
- Oh really?
[Birol] I mean, he would win any elections for his lifetime
in Kosovo forever.
- Really.
- There's no question about it.
[dance music]
[Jeff] Wait, what is that store?
[Dardan] "Hillary"-- that is the store when Hillary visited
Kosovo she stopped to see the Bill Clinton statue,
and then she entered in this shop and the owner
gave her a present, some clothes from the shop
and she took it and it was on the news.
[chuckles]
["Star Spangled Banner" instrumental rendition]
- Oh my word, wow.
[Jeff] Oh my goodness gracious.
[music continues]
[Jeff] Incredible.
[Jeff] Wow, and he is more proud of America
than a lot of Americans.
If Bill Clinton walked into this room, what would he do?
- Let me tell you why this is interesting to me.
Because if you went in any house in the United States,
you would not see these two pictures in the same room.
Thank you.
[show theme music]
[Host] Welcome!
[applause]
- I'm checking email and I see an urgent note from Birol.
The first sentence is, "I'm proud to report we have him."
- I was just glad to know that he was safe
and I was super, super excited.
I was like, I want to go.
[upbeat music]
[Jeff] Hey man how are you?
[Birol] Welcome again.
[Jeff] Good to be here.
[Birol] Absolutely good to see you, hi.
[Gracie] How are you, thank you, it's nice to meet you.
[Jeff]] We were all just kind of floating,
like, "Wow, we found this guy,"
and that felt fantastic, you know?
Turns out his name was Sadik.
I said Birol, what does he do, what's his work?
And he said, he is a wedding singer.
He said which is a big deal.
But I think his dream was to be a pop singer.
And one of his dreams was to perform on the TV show Oxygen .
- Immediately when my dad found out that
he was a wedding singer, he talked to Birol like,
maybe we can do something.
And so it was this, we thought this super exciting thing
that maybe this could be his-- maybe this is his shot.
This is different, is this it?
- Yeah this is it, I went on so...
[Gracie] Do you see him?
- No but we need, let me go in the back and find Birol.
[ambient chatter]
[Gracie] I was pretty nervous, if this kid is just like,
hey nice to meet you,
you know, that's it.
You know, my dad's gonna be crushed.
- Oh yeah, hey Birol, I walked right by you.
So which is he?
Wow, how are you?
Good to see you, what did he say?
- Welcome to Kosovo.
- Oh thank you, thank you, okay good to see you.
It's great to meet you after this long time.
Good to see you.
All of you, all of you came today.
He didn't see the original newscast that had
the photograph in it, but one of his sisters did.
And when she heard the story she said, "That's my sweater,
that's my blue sweater."
And she knew they had cut the sleeves off of it.
[Jeff] Oh thank you.
[Jeff] What was that one moment like when he's like,
"Wow that looks like me?"
[Birol] I was very, we call it an emotion,
it means excited.
[emotional music]
[Gracie] My heart was just pounding,
I mean I would hug him and then look at him,
and then hug him, and then look at him.
I just couldn't believe that he was right in front of me.
[Jeff] Did he ever think during that first day,
"Oh I really don't want to fool with this?"
- I think what I wanted is, that picture is part of the story,
I didn't want it to be the whole story.
- Are his parents alive, and if they are,
do they know about this?
[Birol translating] Yes.
- And what do they think about it?
[Birol translating to Sadik]
- Yeah, you're the guest of honor.
[applause]
- I'm thrilled to find Sadik.
[laughter and applause]
- Tonight is I'm sure the start of a great friendship,
and it's a friendship that in some ways is similar
to the friendship of America and Kosovo,
and I'm thrilled to be some part of that.
And I'll look forward to wherever the adventure
takes us from tonight.
[applause]
[traditional music]
[sings in foreign language]
[applause]
[Host] Bravo!
[emotional piano music]
[cars passing]
[Jeff] The next day, we traveled with Sadik to his village
to have a traditional Albanian dinner with his family.
If you could sing with any three artists?
[Sadik]
- Oh, yeah? - Ah, yes.
[Sadik]
- And what's your favorite Bryan Adams song?
* You tell me
[humming]
* Know it's true, everything I do
* Oh, I do it for you
[cheering and applause]
[Jeff] Sadik, is this right?
- Yes, yes, go, go.
[laughing]
- There's his dad.
[Jeff] Nice to see you.
- Hello, how are you?
[Jeff] Nice to see you.
[Jashar] It's cold, huh?
[Jeff] Yeah, it's freezing.
[laughing]
[Jashar] Yeah.
[Jeff] Yeah, it's freezing.
[Jashar] Not so much.
- I'm from Texas where it's hot.
[Jashar]
- You know, I felt like I was in a really special place.
I mean, I knew that they'd spent seven years
trying to rebuild that house,
after it was burned down.
How are you related to the family?
- Yeah, we're family.
[indiscernible]
[Jeff] So, Sadik is your cousin?
Well, nice to meet you.
- Thank you. Also.
[indiscernible chatter]
[Jeff] You knew her?
- This was my mother.
[Jeff] Really?
[Jashar]
[Shani]
[Jashar]
[Jeff] Really?
[indiscernible chatter]
[Jeff] Hey, did you see this one over here?
Is this you?
- Yeah.
- Do you remember the photographer?
- They walked two and a half days, Sadik says.
[Jeff] Was everything still here when you got here?
- Do you remember it?
[silence]
[barking in the distance]
- Serbs were fighting and were shelling our village.
We thought that it would be safe here,
to seek refuge in the mountains, here.
[barking in the distance]
- But I don't want to see them anymore.
Ever.
[indiscernible chatter]
- Sadik asked me to see the photos that I had taken
the night before.
[laughing]
[Gracie] There's a couple?
[laughing]
Somehow, for him not speaking English,
you know, we went through all the photos, you know,
and his friend was translating a little bit.
After dinner, I could see that there was some shuffling
or what not, and the mom has these yellow flowers,
and this chocolate, and just held onto me,
and said thank you, and I could hear Sadik say,
you know, that's from me.
[Gracie] That's from you?
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
[soft uplifting music]
[Jeff] After the war, the family rebuilt their home,
and Sadik went back to school like a lot of the other kids.
Started singing when he was pretty young.
After high school, he started singing in weddings.
His parents are older, and so,
they really do rely on him.
[slow dramatic music]
Kosovo's gone through hard times since the end
of the war, and it's tough to find jobs,
especially for people Sadik's age,
but eventually, he found work in construction,
so he gets by, but it's not easy.
Are you gonna be playing the guitar or something, too?
[Jeff] Well, they're definitely making it harder.
[singing in foreign language]
[Jeff] Sadik dreams of a music career,
and singing live on national television with Oxygen
gave him a sense of something bigger.
He doesn't like asking for help,
but I've really tried to encourage him.
With the help of his oldest sister,
we tried to get a work visa for Sadik for Germany,
where he'd have more opportunity.
We tried three times, but it didn't work out.
- Test.
[Jeff] I helped him make a music video,
but then, he went on to make one of his own.
I was thrilled when I found out that he had done that.
[singing in foreign language - romantic techno music]
*
[Wade] The picture has a life, it continues to live.
I mean, it's living now, and all of this movement
around the world is all because of this one photograph,
and, for me, that's amazing, you know,
that's a miracle that this photograph is alive.
- The story of Jeff being affected by Alex's photograph
makes perfect sense to me, and I think it's something
that I think she would be very happy to know about,
because, in the end, that's what we want as photographers,
you want the connection, you want that effect.
I mean, it starts with one person.
[singing in foreign language - dance music]
*
[Jeff] Alexander's mother, early on, I asked her,
"How would your daughter feel about me going to do this?"
And she said, "Not only would she be okay with it,
she would have gone with you."
This was the whole point of her work,
this was the whole point of her life,
to take images that really moved people.
[slow dramatic music]
When I look at it now, I don't see the same photograph
that I saw-- that war photo.
I see a real person, I know that person,
I know his mother, I know his father,
I know Birol, and Dardan, and that picture, now,
it's almost gone from being a single frame
to part of this continuum,
and we are all a part of that.
[dramatic music]
In the war, were there people all up here?
Oh, down. Yeah.
Your tent, yeah.
Will he ever come here again in his life?
[rain falling, dramatic music]
- How long was he here?
- So, for him,
is this a safe place?
- This was a safe place.
Yeah.
- Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, today it's all right.
[Jeff] We should go.
[slow dramatic music]
[upbeat emotional music]
*
[faster tempo upbeat music]
[Balkan music]
[slow dramatic music]