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So at 8:30 on a Saturday night in June when a projector and 250-square-foot movie screen are erected by American technicians in a clearing in front of Neprostina's hospital tent, no one knows what to expect. The sky threatens rain. Refugees, hearing rumors of something strange, stream from the narrow lanes between the rows of tents: silent women in head scarfs, young men in track suits, children by the hundreds. Outside the camp's razor-wire fence, one truck is disgorging a dozen more exhausted Kosovars, while a second is loaded with the belongings of a family risking an early return despite mined schoolyards and booby-trapped homes. Packed front-to-back under the TV tent beside the clearing, 500 men stare with rapt attention at the 20-inch screen for the latest word of their country. Serb-sympathetic Russians at the airport in Pristina. Squads of KLA irregulars, teenagers mostly, baby-faced and deeply tanned, coming down from the hills. Mass graves. An elderly man with broken glasses puts his ear to the TV's side and closes his eyes. The others are silent, their expressions stoic, except for the handful who openly weep.

The film projector fires its image, offering the Kosovars the quintessential American motion-picture experience: Charlie Chaplin waddling 20 feet high against the night sky, a drive-in theater from another era, another world. Most cinemas in Kosovo, except the one in its capital, Pristina, were boarded up five years ago, when the latest wave of troubles with the Serbs began. So for nearly all the children, this is their first full-sized movie ever; for most adults, their first in many years. Craning their necks, eyes wide with astonishment, the children cry out and applaud. Within minutes, though, most of the adults and older teenagers drift away, shrugging with disappointment and boredom. They can't know -- and, by their expressions, couldn't have cared less -- that this is the first time in the history of humanitarian relief that anything like this -- refugee cinema -- has been attempted.

"My uncle was killed four days ago going back home to check on the house and land," says Hidagete Ismali, 20, as she stands at the camp's gate with her father, Sadik, 67. Behind them, the Chaplin film has segued into a Yogi Bear cartoon, but she is too preoccupied to watch. Maybe it is nice for the children, she says, but as for herself, "I have nothing to eat, no place to sleep. I'm always thinking about over there. Are the relatives alive, does our house exist? What will we do when we go back to Kosovo where we have nothing?"

More Chaplin now, the carnival soundtrack competing with the drone of the newscaster from the nearby TV: columns of Serbs are fleeing Kosovo. Behind them, vengeful Albanians are looting and burning their homes. Kosovo's two ancient cultural centers, Pec and Djacovica, have been laid to waste. My translator, a 19-year-old law student at the university in Pristina, turns from the movie screen to inform me that in his town an old Serb had protected his Albanian neighbor through the months of horror. When the Albanian's son returned, he went to thank the neighbor for saving his father. Then he shot him in the head. The circle, he says, closes.

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The film equipment, the technical and administrative personnel and the movies themselves were flown here two days earlier by FilmAid, a consortium of Hollywood producers, directors, actors and studios who had mobilized their own brand of relief.

The first film was meant to have starred British actress Julia Ormond: "Legends of the Fall," perhaps, co-starring Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins. Ormond already has a vested interest in the Balkans, having produced the powerfully raw documentary "Calling the Ghost," about Muslim women raped by Serbs in Sarajevo. At one point she decided to come to the Macedonia camps herself, permitting the refugees to gaze at the real Julia as well as the celluloid one. By doing so she hoped to offer some level of star-powered edification, if not inspiration. After all, Richard Gere had already come; he spent six days in Stankovic I, the refugee camp of choice among diplomats and celebrities because of its proximity to Skopje's hotels and restaurants. The press releases say he was a hit. Vanessa Redgrave came, too.

FilmAid was the brainchild of Caroline Baron, the New York producer of films like "Addicted to Love" and "Home for the Holidays." Last fall, a New York Times photograph of an Albanian Kosovar slumped in the dirt, executed by Serbs before his family, raised her ire -- and her conscience. By day she was shooting "Flawless," a new movie with Robert De Niro. At night she went home to obsess on footage of mass graves and the refugee exodus out of Kosovo into the camps. History began to shout down at her.

"I was always angry as a kid studying the Holocaust, thinking how Americans did nothing to help the situation," Baron, 37, tells me in New York, before her flight to Skopje. She describes a dinner party she attended in April at which she complained about her disgust over Kosovo. Her friend Hector Babanco, director of "Kiss of the Spider Woman," leaned across the table and told her to shut up and do something. The next morning she awoke to a radio interview with the director of the International Rescue Committee's Emergency Response Team, Gerald Martone, in which he said that one of the biggest problems in the refugee camps was boredom. Of the original 800,000 refugees scattered between Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro, nearly 500,000 remain, afraid to move. "They are not dying," Martone says. "The tragedy they face is a very bleak, dreary existence, days with nothing to do but watch yet more buses being deposited into their camp. There's no diversion from their own ruminations, flashbacks of what they had fled from."

Baron recalls: "I thought, 'I'm a movie producer, I can do something about that.' I flashed to 'Sullivan's Travels,' the Preston Sturges film about an impoverished church. Joel Macray plays a film director, and he says, 'There's a lot to be said for making people laugh. That's all some people have.'"

Next page | Is this humanitarian aid, or is it marketing to a captive audience?