Cinematographer Sarah Levy and director John Ealer observe preparations for the lifting of the crosses onto St. Dimitrije church in a scene from the film View From the Bridge: Stories from Kosovo, directed by John Ealer. The film is part of the 2007 Rhode Island International Film Festival.

Kosovo is one of those forgotten enclaves that most Americans probably couldn’t find on a map, even though the United States and NATO bombed this region of the former Yugoslavia in 1999 in an attempt to end the ethnic violence that had raged since 1989 when minority Serbs tried to eliminate the majority Albanians in a program of ethnic cleansing. Kosovo, which was part of the much larger Serbia, became a battleground.

Since the civil war was declared over at the turn of the century, the Albanians have lived an uneasy truce with the Serbs. Fortunes have been reversed. The Serbs, who had fired the Albanians from their jobs in Kosovo and tried to force them to leave the region, are now the ones living in terror from sporadic attacks by the Albanian majority. The Albanians now live in relative freedom, but the scars of the civil war are still very strong. People who have lost loved ones on both sides still fester with hatred.

Six years after peace was declared, filmmakers Laura Bialis and John Ealer traveled across Kosovo to bring back the personal stories of people who were touched by the horrors of war in their incisive documentary View from the Bridge: Stories from Kosovo which will be screened at 5 p.m. tomorrow at URI’s downtown Providence Feinstein campus as part of the Rhode Island International Film Festival.

It’s a melancholy journey. Both sides are still angry at each other. In the major city of Mitrovica, a bridge separates the Serbian side from the Albanian side. It’s still extremely dangerous for one group to cross over into the other’s territory, even though in the 1980s there was no such divide.

There are horror stories on both sides in a film that is filled with unhappy anecdotes. There’s the little Albanian girl and her brothers who now live with their uncle after seeing their parents killed. There are the Albanian brothers who return to the ruins of their former house under cover of a UN officer, careful not to tread on land mines that might have been placed on the property. There’s the doctor at a rundown Serbian hospital worrying about water that often doesn’t flow and electricity that cuts on and off. There are the Christian Serbs who witnessed the destruction of their church by Muslim Albanians and the Serbs in another part of Kosovo who have built a large church in defiance and a determination to stay. There’s the Albanian woman, visiting a Red Cross office yet again to see if anyone can tell her what had happened to her husband and 15 relatives who had been rounded up by Serb paramilitaries one night and were never seen again. There are the Roma Gypsies who have been resettled into shacks built by the UN that sit on a toxic waste dump.

View from the Bridge offers little hope in a place where the wounds are still fresh. “How do you destroy a hatred that’s survived for generations?” asks the narrator at the start. It’s a sobering question that finds no uplifting answers. A priest at an Orthodox monastery hopes that people “will find their common European unity,” but that doesn’t look promising.

Bialis and Ealer’s comprehensive film only adds to the list of peoples who live next to each other but cannot come together because of their differences, whether it’s Israelis and Palestinians or the Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq. At the end, there’s a glimmer of hope, but one that doesn’t burn very brightly.

mjanuson@projo.com