Valley of Peace (Dolina Miru)

A little Slovenian boy innocently questions as he looks up at the Allied planes in the sky of a war-torn Yugoslavia in the 1940s: “if the Americans are really on our side, why would they drop bombs on our town?”. This interrogation could be made at any point in any decade since the 1940s and still there would never be a good answer. Valley of Peace (Dolina miru), a Yugoslavian film from 1956 about a Black American pilot guiding an orphaned Slovenian boy and an even younger German girl to the idyllic Valley of Peace (which the girl’s grandmother once told her about), understands the tragic loss goading the question and retorts back with an unflinching altruism.

John Kitzmiller plays Jim, the altogether decent American pilot downed in enemy territory after a bombing run. German forces hunt him as he traverses the unknown country with the two young children to whom he becomes attached. Jim speaks to the young girl, Lotti (Evelyne Wohlfeiler), in German, who then translates to Slovenian for the slightly older Marko (Tugo Štiglic). Marko insists that the Valley where his uncle lives has no war; hearing that it’s in the opposite direction as the Nazis is more than enough to convince Jim.

Continue reading at DMovies.