The Making of a Revolution
Netherlands, 2001, video, color, 52 min.
English and Serbian with English subtitles.
Winner of the amnesty international Award in Amsterdam in 2001, The Making of the Revolution employs a simple digital camera to follow OTPOR!, the Serbian student movement that began with only a dozen members and quickly grew to a people’s army of 50,000. OTPOR! (“resistance”) took the lead in creating the nonviolent revolution that led to Slobodan Milosevic’s ultimate admission of electoral defeat and ouster in October 2000. With a diaristic voiceover narration, Rejger and van den Broek capture the strategies of the organization that claims to have been leaderless but played a major role in the eventual democratic uprising of a million people. The filmmakers use their investigation of the new Serbian government and Milosevic’s eventual imprisonment to argue for nonviolent actions as a model for global social change.