T 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.
Kitzmiller is brilliant in his dance of urgency and compassion and was rightly appreciated for such at the time, becoming the first Black man to ever win the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival. His race never comes up explicitly in the minimal dialogue, but the threat his blackness poses to racial purity also can’t be missed. More practically, his skin also implicitly identifies his side of the war in a land where sides matter greatly.
The children add an innocent twist to the predicament of another Iron Curtain movie, and a more famous one: Coach to Vienna (Karel Kachyňa, 1967). There, a runaway Austrian soldier forces a Czech woman (whom the Nazis just made a widow) to take him and his dying comrade to Vienna in her carriage. They are adults and the violence is much more personal (the film opens with the German forces hanging her husband), so the vendetta and uncomfortable tension are unavoidable. The violence in Valley of Peace is neither means muted nor sanitised. It is less personal, though; a bomb destroys the homes of the two children, and we never see the bodies of their guardians.
It’s a beautiful film, too. Most of it is spent in the beautiful Balkan outdoors and cinematographer Rudi Vaupotič wastes no exterior shots on anything short of gorgeous. The white horse that inexplicably follows the three unlikely travellers operates like some sort of guardian angel, plus it adds an elegant streak of saintly purity to the monochromatic photography. The exchange of gunfire and bombs only temporarily disrupts the natural beauty of this world. The beauty of the natural world also makes their journey to the Valley of Peace presciently hopeless: if this isn’t paradise, paradise can’t exist. The idyllic life reminds us of what is to be lost in the stakes of war, even a righteous one.
The innocence of the children and particularly of the young German girl – does a lot of the moral heavy lifting. Too often in WW2 films, the German language signals evil; the presence of the language itself becomes an alienated symbol of evil. This is the case in something like Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) when the German is rarely translated on screen. The rhetoric becomes ethnically totalising, equally condemning all German speakers. Valley of Peace challenges this generalisation. Director France Štiglic seems aware of the problem too. When Jim first meets the girl, he shows a healthy apprehension at her German despite him also knowing the language because of what it might mean for where he has landed; it’s not until Marko says a word that Jim recognises as Slovenian that he breathes in relief. The wonderful irony is in Jim finding solace, solidarity, and something worth defending in both of the young people, including the girl, whose parents likely supported Hitler.
The skirmishes, crucial as they are to fortify the sense of danger, distract from the more meaningful heart of the film: the tragic relationship of these three lost travellers to one another. The fighting itself is more or less just point, shoot, and make loud noises, and that is something a filmmaker can only hold for so long before it becomes tedious. One could easily assume that a different filmmaker directed these scenes. The final battle is marginally better than the ones that come before it and this is only because Kitzmiller’s more focused performance lifts the material.
The original score from the important Slovenian composer Marjan Kozina also occasionally misses the tone of the moment, and, on at least one occasion, makes an error in judgment about the emotion the images communicate. Still, Jim’s endangerment – and what it would mean for Lotti and Marko to lose their new parental figure – has too much emotion behind it for any half-baked action or mismatched score to ruin. His almost pathetic urge to get back to the children is heartwarming. It comes as close to responding to that innocent question from the Slovene boy at the beginning of the film as possible.
Watch Valley of Peace as part of ArteKino Classics 2025 – just click here for more information.
