On Zlatko Pranjić and Nanna Frank Møller’s The Sky Above Zenica (2024)
Zlatko Pranjić and Nanna Frank Møller, The Sky Above Zenica, 2024.
Available in Croatian here.
When in 1892 an ironworks was founded in Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina had already been under Austro-Hungarian rule for 14 years. The industrial development of the city with these and other facilities significantly contributed to the increase in the number of inhabitants. Zenica became an urban center that, before the beginning of World War II, at that point already part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, could boast with the country’s largest company. More than 4,000 workers worked in the ironworks. Zenica also became a meeting place for intellectuals. Numerous cultural and educational societies were founded in the city, as well as newspapers and magazines.
With the establishment of socialist Yugoslavia after World War II, the ironworks in Zenica grew to one of the largest in Europe, with 17,000 employees as early as the 1970s, and as many as 24,000 just before the war in the 1990s. In the early 1960s, the Faculty of Metallurgy and the accompanying Institute were founded in the city, a little later the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, and even the Zenica football club has beared the name Čelik (Steel) since 1945. As an industrial center, Zenica has become one of the largest Bosnian cities, with about 145,000 inhabitants in 1991, and about 100,000 today.
However, it was known already in the 1960s that iron production in Zenica represents an environmental problem. Despite the socialist infatuation with heavy industry, American and British experts were brought to the city in the 1980s to think of ways to solve the pollution. The 1990s war did not interrupt only this initiative – from 1992 to 1999, the Zenica ironworks did not work at all, and with the onset of privatization, it was first taken over by the Kuwaiti administration, then in 2004 by the Indian owner Mittal Steel. That company was merged with Arcelor in 2006, which itself had been created in 2004 by merging three smaller European producers (the Spanish Acelaria, the French Usinor, and the Luxembourgish Arbed). Since 2007, the steel mill has therefore been operating under the ArcelorMittal corporation, the second largest steel producer in the world today. ArcelorMittal also operates in Prijedor, connecting the two plants into one system. Since 2008, the corporation has been involved in what is known as integrated steel production, in which iron comes from iron ore through the process of smelting.
The resulting by-products are extreme pollutants. In 2008, the local population gathered in Eco Forum, a non-governmental organization that continuously draws attention to the problem of ArcelorMittal’s operations in Zenica. Several of its members are also the protagonists of Zlatko Pranjić and Nanna Frank Møller’s documentary “The Sky Above Zenica” (2024), the filming of which spanned seven years.
Pranjić grew up in Zenica but moved to London in the 1990s, where he eventually heard about the activities of the Eco Forum. In 2012, the organization managed to sensitize the public outside of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the problem in Zenica. The Guardian wrote about the topic, while BBC 4 prepared its own documentary. Since ArcelorMittal threatened with lawsuits, that project was not developed further. Consequently, “The Sky Above Zenica” is of extreme importance for the city’s international image. After its premiere at this year’s 30th Sarajevo Film Festival, the film continued its usual festival life and will be available in Croatia on HBO’s streaming platform this fall.
The audience Is introduced to the portrait of the city through gloomy, almost dystopian industrial landscapes which continuously interrupt the narrative flow. Nanna Frank Møller’s cinematography makes the filmed spaces additionally hostile and sombre, as she insists on cold, bluish tones and a slightly lower exposure. In the local women’s conversation at the market, the topic of serious illnesses comes up right at the beginning – it is impossible to buy just any food because one of them treats cancer. A little later, once they take a bus to get closer to the giant plant from which thick and heavy smoke is billowing, one of them will conclude that “some Indian guy came and opened an ironworks, man – why didn’t he open it in London?”
The ironworks stretches along the Zenica settlement of Tetovo, some parts of which, it turns out, have no streets without at least one oncology patient. On the other hand, a significant number of the people suffers from type 2 diabetes, including the young ones. There is no official confirmation that the air in Zenica is dangerous, so the Eco Forum activists work diligently to list all those whose health is compromised. The job is not easy because many refuse to talk about their issues, afraid they would loose the jobs provided by ArcelorMittal. It is common knowledge that the statistics are truly devastating, after all – the everyday life captured in “The Sky Above Zenica” is repeatedly accompanied with a radio program that reveals that the connection between air pollution and respiratory problems is a scientific fact. World Health Organization (WHO) has established that Bosnia and Herzegovina has the second highest mortality rate in the world precisely from this cause. North Korea holds first place.
An Important link in the fight to improve the situation in the city is Samir Lemeš, a mechanical engineer who is also a university professor and dean of the Polytechnic Faculty. He warns that ArcelorMittal’s coking plant is very dangerous, and that it wouldn’t be possible to leave such a plant without exhaust gas filters anywhere else in Europe. Situated beyond the border of the European Union, Zenica represents Bosnia as something of an industrial colony in which practices out of norms are tolerated, as long as European suppliers have access to the raw materials they need in their neighborhood (this parallel can also be drawn today with Rio Tinto’s plans in the Serbian Jadar Valley).
Yet the hypocrisy of European institutions certainly goes beyond the laissez faire approach; it is the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) that gives a loan to ArcelorMittal, which intends to build a heating plant along with Finnish partners. Although the heating plant should theoretically serve the citizens and remove some of the harmful by-products from iron production, households would still pay for heating, and the actual utilization of the iron plant’s exhaust gases would amount to only about 20%. Furthermore, although presented as a separate project, the heating plant would still retain ArcelorMittal’s management, and the attitude of the EBRD towards the justified doubts of the local community is also surprising. In the manner of Frederick Wiseman, the film features public debates attended by the EBRD representatives who present the long-disputed theory about exhaust gases from passenger cars and wood-burning stoves as the crucial factors in pollution. Even the mayor, Fuad Kasumović, doesn’t come across as authentic while branding Zenica as a green city, following the EBRD’s 2019 action plan.
Professor Lemeš takes on the role of an ordinary man fighting the system, despite the place he would be expected to occupy in it based on his expertise. At the same time, the system is symptomatically paradoxical – what is the purpose of environmental permits if investors set their own requirements, instead of them being the ones who need to fulfill some? This kind of problem clearly has a social dimension, where the communities yearning for capital agree to be slaves to foreign investment at any cost. Private interest surpasses that of the public even with the voices like professor’s present, exposing themselves to being society’s corrective. This struggle is where the main dramaturgy of “The Sky Above Zenica” is, it being a convincing account of how it doesn’t suffice to just sweep one’s own backyard – or to be more illustrative, to abstain from lighting coal stoves and ride a bicycle instead of a car.
The film will communicate a lot to the Western audiences that mistakenly think that cloudy horizons like those in Zenica do not concern them at all. Although these horizons to them belong to distant, supposedly for their own reasons unorganized milieux they often don’t even plan on visiting as tourists, they are very much a reflection of policies strategically taylored by Western institutions. That documentary cinema can nevertheless be an important tool in catalyzing the discussion about bad social practices has already been proven with the premiere of Pranjić and Frank Møller’s work – ArcelorMittal announced the closure of its coking plant just one week after that screening. Until further notice, this reduces the emission of harmful gases in Zenica by 80%.