“The European Parliament is the same as the Serbian Parliament: they are not interested in dialogue,” said Zlatko Kokanović, activist from the environmental association Ne damo Jadar (We Will not Give up Jadar), after he was prevented from joining the debate that followed the screening of Peter Tom Jones’s documentary Not in My Country: Serbia’s Lithium Dilemma in the European Parliament on February 5 of this year. The screening and ensuing panel discussion—which disallowed questions and comments from the audience, including Kokanović—were ostensibly arranged to examine the pros and cons of the controversial lithium mining project in Serbia’s Jadar valley by the British-Australian company Rio Tinto. The timing was significant: the company’s Serbian subsidiary is hoping that, under the European Union’s Critical Raw Materials Act, the Jadar mine will be approved as a “strategic project” for the EU. On March 24, the European Commission approved 47 strategic projects across the EU that would secure access to raw materials, while its decisions about projects located in third countries, including Serbia, are still pending. In the meantime, Not in My Country continues to be screened at critical raw materials conferences; its scheduled screening at Belgium’s Docville international documentary festival, however, was recently canceled following an open letter by an international collective of academics and artists decrying the film’s questionable politics.
I watched Not in My Country as a scholar of narrative in literature and film. Much like the debate at the European Parliament silenced Ne damo Jadar, an association from the rural community that would be most affected by lithium mining, this documentary silences a gamut of environmental organizations, scientific reports, economic analyses, and both political and civilian opposition to lithium mining in Serbia. In the face of criticism that the documentary is, effectively, PR for Rio Tinto, Jones, director of the KU Leuven Institute for Sustainable Metals and Minerals (SIM²), assures his detractors that it was neither commissioned nor financed by Rio Tinto, despite SIM²’s collaborative projects with this and other lithium companies worldwide.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter who financed the film. Its narrative and aesthetic choices—the voice-over, dialogue, visual framing, background music—heavily greenwash Rio Tinto and simplistically present the main problem as a conflict between those who altruistically advance environmentally friendly technologies and, in Jones’s words, “merchants of fear” spreading “violent” disinformation about lithium mining.
Colonial Tropes in the Documentary’s Narrative Framing and Aesthetic Choices
As Dr. Jones—the voice-over’s insistent references to his title endow him with unquestionable authority—meets alternately with Rio Tinto’s executives and members of Ne damo Jadar, the background music shifts between modern, upbeat tunes and traditional, vaguely “Balkan,” and at times, ominous notes. Jones’s overt empathy with Rio Tinto’s executives’ debunking of popular misconceptions about lithium mining contrasts with his bafflement in the face of Ne damo Jadar’s suspicion of international mining companies in general—whether European, Russian, or Chinese—unwillingness to “compromise,” disinterest in profit, and insistence that their “land and water are priceless.” Drawing on entrenched, colonial-era Balkan stereotypes, the film reductively paints Serbs who are opposed to the project not only as uneducated victims of conspiracy theories but also as self-sabotaging peasants who refuse to mature into civilized Europeans by aiding the EU’s green transition. Jones dismissively comments on their willingness to even “sacrifice” their lives in the “war” against the mine, although Serbian authorities’ and Rio Tinto’s gradual, relentless strongarming of the country toward lithium mining could itself be described as low-level warfare, conducted through various modes of slow violence.
In addition to serene music, the green and fertile Jadar valley often completes a pastoral backdrop to Jones’s conversations with Rio Tinto executives, who explain that the mine will be virtually invisible aboveground and electronically managed. In contrast, the footage of mass protests against the Jadar mine is always in black and white, with protesters’ loud chanting puncturing such idyllic visions of environmental utopia—violent emotions overruling facts, as Jones observes repeatedly, dubbing protests “very strange.” Although Jones acknowledges that the protests are complex and politically diverse, the film never delves into compounded reasons that drive such massive opposition; it only briefly alludes to them in conversation with Serbian anthropologist Jelena Vasiljević, who has since withdrawn her permission to be featured in the film due to its lack of depth and nuance. Vasiljević explains that people are right to be wary of Rio Tinto due to their track record of environmental degradation, but also of Serbian authorities’ tendency to manage “strategic projects” in a corrupt, non-transparent, and undemocratic manner, while forestalling debate through virtually total media control. But Jones can’t genuinely hear or engage Vasiljević’s arguments either, and instead proceeds to counter, misunderstand, deflect; over the course of the interview, her increasing agitation comes into painful contrast with his composure. The film’s betrayal of its alleged commitment to dialogue and deep familiarity with local conditions is enhanced through repeated mispronunciation of Serbian toponyms (even Jadar) and misspelling of Serbian names (for example, Nemenja, Dedovic).
Absent from the film is an analysis of Serbia’s neoliberal politics, including the authorities’ alleged cancellation of the Jadar project in 2022 to pacify protests and Serbia’s Constitutional Court’s sudden overturning of this decision in 2024, after which German and EU delegations promptly signed an agreement with Serbia on importing critical minerals. Aside from the scientist Dragana Đorđević, the film makes no mention of numerous scientific reports that warn of irreversible damage to the Jadar valley biodiversity, nor of a broad environmental movement uniting scientists, intellectuals, activists, and politicians, many of whom have been subjected to intimidation, arrests, and death threats. Significantly, the film is also silent on the economic benefits of the Jadar mine: while Rio Tinto and Serbian elites are certainly set to profit, Serbian economist Aleksandar Matković estimates that the country’s annual GDP will grow, at most, by a negligible 3%, in addition to modest windfalls for local communities in the Jadar valley. In the film, only Ne damo Jadar emphasize this disparity, worried that the mine will primarily benefit rich Europeans and their environment while turning Serbia into a “landfill.” This larger economic context—Serbia’s peripheral, non-EU position which makes it vulnerable to neocolonial mining practices—is overshadowed by the focus on a supposedly equally shared European “home.”
The film’s excessive focus on the battle between science and obscurantism also aims to present the issue at hand as apolitical. Indeed, Jones laments the politicization of the Jadar mine in Serbia, describing it, instead, as a step forward in the direction of ideologically disinterested sustainability. But the film contradicts itself, as the EU’s geopolitical competitors haunt the script: as German MEP Hildegard Bentele explains to Jones, Europe needs Serbia’s lithium so that it can reduce its dependence on China. According to Bentele, this is a “great opportunity” for Serbia to become part of the EU’s supply value chain, implying that Serbia, a candidate for EU membership for over a decade, needs to trade its natural resources for political benefits. Mobilizing Cold War rhetoric, Jones also (incorrectly) observes that, on the map of Europe, Serbia is located between “Western Europe and Russia,” even implicitly accusing Russia of organizing the campaign of disinformation to erode the EU’s influence in the region. In a situation where we are witnessing renewed imperial conflicts over Ukraine’s minerals critical to the green transition—including lithium— pressures over lithium mining in Serbia give the lie to the EU’s attempts to position itself as a force in the service of democracy and preservation of sovereignty.
Victim Blaming and Scapegoating
Perhaps the most poignant moment in the film comes when Jones interviews Radmila, a Jadar valley resident, who observes that those protesting the mine are in a minority and are being generously bribed by foreigners (whom, she never specifies), since nobody attends rallies “for free.” Then, she asks Jones to give her a chocolate bar in exchange for the interview, saying that many of her neighbors profited from selling their estates to Rio Tinto while she got “nothing.” Jones laughs off this, on the surface, facetious exchange, unaware of its subtext. Namely, Radmila recycles Serbian authorities’ routine disparagement of opponents as foreign hirelings but also unwittingly hints at their own tendency to organize large pro-government rallies by both coercing and offering cash payments to alleged supporters. Many people who attend such rallies are precariously employed in the public sector and private companies close to the regime. Radmila’s request for chocolate “payment” reveals not only her economic precarity but also the now entrenched custom of dispensing rewards, however small, to some of the most vulnerable members of society in exchange for political support. The immiseration of Serbian workers due to unfavorable labor laws, glaring social inequalities, and the regime’s widespread practice of purchasing support—through securing employment, vote buying, payment for participation in rallies—remains under the surface in Not in My Country, legible only to those familiar with Serbian affairs.Nonetheless, the framing of this exchange implies that it is protesters who have serious money at their disposal rather than multinational corporations or Serbia’s ruling parties. The film abounds in similar instances of victim blaming and gaslighting: it is protesters who are violent rather than self-possessed Rio Tinto’s executives or Serbia’s police and criminal groups regularly mobilized to suppress opposition; it is protesters that are imprisoned in self-righteous echo chambers while soft-spoken, ostensibly neutral experts like Jones foster dialogue. But the most insidious, and harmful, argument that this documentary advances is that the handful of media critical of the government lead the alleged lithium disinformation campaign; in contrast, the regime’s tight control over the vast majority of Serbian media merits no mention. These scant critical outlets are discredited through their association with the United Media group owned by “the richest man in Serbia,” Dragan Šolak, long targeted as “state enemy number one,” the implication being, again, that journalists are bribed into writing anti-mine articles. In a situation where recalcitrant journalists are increasingly threatened, physically attacked, and targeted through smear campaigns, Not in My Country joins Serbian authorities in the dangerous game of scapegoating.
By treating economically peripheral countries’ grassroots opposition as geopolitical pawns, incapable of independent thought or decision making, with alleged financial reward, as Radmila implies, as their only motivation, Not in My Country joins Serbian authorities in painting opponents as foreign agents, including those participating in ongoing student-led anti-corruption protests (which also criticize Rio Tinto’s Jadar project). And, in a similar way that Serbian authorities’ initially pacifying offers of dialogue rang hollow to students, Jones’s purported desire to stage a democratic debate about the mine after all critical decisions have already been made comes across as disingenuous.
Nataša Kovačević (@NatasaPhD) is professor of English at Eastern Michigan University. She is the author of Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization (Routledge, 2008), Uncommon Alliances: Cultural Narratives of Migration in the New Europe (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), and most recently, Nonaligned Imagination: Yugoslavia, the Global South, and Literary Solidarities beyond the Cold War Blocs (forthcoming from Northwestern University Press, 2025).