One More Mile: A Dialogue on Nation-Building
(80 minutes, digital Betacam, 2002)

By Elizabeth Coffman and Ted Hardin

description | reviews | screenings | history | interview transcripts | bios | contact info

home

 

Reviews


**“The best documentaries, and surely ONE MORE MILE is in that class, speak to larger truths. As the U.S. launches forth on its next decade of imperialism, we need to be reminded that we are repeating history. The bureaucracy being created by foreign aid workers in Bosnia foreshadows one we are about to create in Iraq…and then, God knows where else? With clarity and justifiable irony, these filmmakers have presented the well-intentioned internationals, newcomers to this beleaguered country, as they must appear to natives, as 21st century carpetbaggers. It is the kind of documentary that is likely to seem even more relevant 10 years from now than it does today.”
- George Stoney, Documentary Filmmaker and Professor of Documentary Film, N.Y.U.


** “The flocks of foreign journalists have left Sarajevo, their place now
taken by scores of ‘internationals’ who have come to run Bosnia and ‘set the standard’ for the country’s acceptable international integration. But the process of enhanced nation-building is not an easy one. A recurring image of a chess-game persists throughout ONE MORE MILE: could one wrong move put an end to the fragile peace? Filmmakers Elizabeth Coffman and Ted Hardin travel through Bosnia and talk to local people and international program officers tracing the difficult choices they all face in areas like education, the economy, the arts, and the media. In a mosaic fashion, the film explores various facets of present-day Bosnian life, tackling a range of uneasy issues- the oblivious attitudes to reconciliation, the controversial international involvement, the rise in faith-based segregation, the daunting outmigration. But it all ends on an optimistic note, showing ordinary Bosnians sharing their ordinary ‘utopian’ dreams.”
- Dina Iordanova, author of Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and the Media


** “About the only thing more complex than trying to rebuild a country from the
ground up is trying to make a film about the process. ONE MORE MILE does just that, pulling together the fragmented remnants of characters and dreams in a landscape that has been reduced to physical and ideological rubble.”
- Russell Porter, Documentary Filmmaker, Chicago, Illinois

 

top