The Oscar hopeful that’s helping Bosnia confront its past
Tim Robey on ‘Quo Vadis, Aida?’ – a heartbreaking drama about the notorious Srebrenica massacre
It has taken a quarter-century for the genocide at Srebrenica, in July 1995, to be tackled head-on in a feature film. This alone makes the Bosnian awards contender Quo Vadis, Aida? the year’s most important film. It also happens to be one of the best.
Written and directed by 46-yearold Jasmila Žbanić, who lived through the siege of Sarajevo in her late teens, the film zeroes in on the mounting panic of Aida (the astonishing Jasna Đuričić), a Bosnian Muslim working as a translator for the UN, who tries to wield her bureaucratic clout to save her family from the brewing aggression of Serbian armed forces.
Amid a chaotic humanitarian crisis during which the UN’s Dutch peacekeepers vacillated, more than 8,700 Muslim men and boys were rounded up and killed. This operation was masterminded by Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb army leader who was sentenced to life by The Hague in 2017. Even now, the Serbian mayor of Srebrenica denies that genocide has been proven, and the topic is so divisive that both this film’s Serbian lead actors have faced death threats for daring to make it.
Deeply moving and meticulously researched, Žbanić’s film is a horrifying wake-up call to a world that has grown sketchy on Srebrenica’s details. One scene, with a grieving mother recognising the unearthed skeletons of her loved ones, can never be shaken off.
Amid waves of acclaim since its Venice premiere, Quo Vadis, Aida? just got an Oscar nomination for Best International Film, on top of two Bafta nominations – not only in the foreign language category but in Best Director.
“I think I had 225 emails of congratulations,” Žbanić tells me over Zoom, fresh from the Oscar news. “It has lifted the whole energy of people in Bosnia. And for sure, more people will see it.”
She describes the events of Srebrenica as “still such a hot subject, and very emotional for Bosnian Muslims. There are still 1,000 bodies that the Mothers of Srebrenica are searching for. And there’s a strong political effort from Serbia that genocide is denied.”
Žbanić was well prepared for the controversy surrounding this after the experience of her first feature, Grbavica ( 2006), which won Berlin’s Golden Bear. That focused on a single mother in Sarajevo whose daughter was conceived by rape, and prompted seething outrage on the Serbian Right. As a result, she set about making Quo Vadis, Aida? as a near-undercover operation, having grasped that location shooting in Srebrenica itself would be politically impossible.
“We were filming without anyone knowing about it. For two years I didn’t give any interviews – I didn’t want Srebrenica as a topic to be exploited by politicians. After Venice, we prepared a premiere just for young people. This was our strategy – trying not to create conflict or give the media a reason for scandal or division. The film was not made to divide people but to make us understand each other better.”
There have been other dramatisations of war in Bosnia, one of which won an Oscar 20 years ago: Danis Tanović’s seriocomic parable No Man’s Land (2001). Others have come from an outside perspective – Michael Winterbottom’s reportage-focused Welcome to Sarajevo (1997), the BBC series Warriors (1999), about British peacekeepers, and Angelina Jolie’s directorial debut, In the Land of Blood and Honey (2014).
The latter, which called more attention to rape as a weapon of war, helped establish the UK’s Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative, thanks in part to the activism of Baroness Arminka Helic, the Tory peer who was granted asylum after escaping Bosnia in 1992. Baroness Helic has been heavily involved over here in gaining Quo Vadis, Aida? the attention it deserves, during a film awards “campaign” which was conducted without the feature even having a US distributor.
“I knew from an early stage about the film and the difficulties it faced,” Helic tells me.
“A film on Srebrenica was long overdue. I hoped that it might help lift the veil of denial that still lies over the genocide and show people what happened.
“Twenty-five years after the war, the truth is being rejected. Denial has moved from the fringes of the far Right into the mainstream. Last year, a genocide denier, Peter Handke, received a Nobel Prize [the Austrian author cast doubt on the massacre in a book in 1996]. This is what we are up against.”
Despite all of Žbanić’s efforts to pre-empt hostility in the region, her film’s growing acclaim has inevitably triggered a backlash. Headlines in Serbia’s tabloid press include “Dirty lies about Srebrenica are being pushed for an Oscar” and “Serbs are yet again culprits and criminals”.
Serbian state censorship meant no cinema distributors would touch it there, but the pandemic has enabled viewers to find it on VoD platforms – a victory of sorts, if a bittersweet one for Žbanić.
“I hate that people are watching the film on laptops or TV,” she admits. “I really wish they were in the cinema. Because we took care of every little detail. There is one squeaking of a pig, where my sound designer had to send me 20 alternatives that I rejected. And then people are watching it on a phone – I want to die!”
Her gratitude that people are able to see it “without fear” overrides this, however, and she feels that this was the right moment to confront the subject, following Mladić’s trial in 2017, which provided a wealth of documentation and allowed her to “get all the facts right”.
Crucially, it is a female-centred response to military machismo, anchored by Đuričić’s devastating performance. “We don’t have many films from a female perspective on war,” Žbanić reflects.
“Showing a woman trying to rescue her family in these circumstances, rather than heroic moments with soldiers. As a woman, I am always on the other side.”
Žbanić and her cinematographer, Christine Maier, agreed on “no attraction to the spectacle of war”. Her script, to avoid any distortion or infidelity, used verbatim dialogue from propaganda videos which Mladić (Boris Isaković) recorded at the time.
As for the UN, whose refusal to take sides paved the way for unthinkable bloodshed, Žbanić is waiting for a screening to take place for officials, in the hope that mistakes can be understood within what she still insists is a “valuable organisation”. The urgency of these lessons is something she underlines quite gravely.
“If Srebrenica was happening today, I am afraid that the outcome would be the same.
“When you stop to think – who, among our European politicians, would say, ‘No, we have to stop the killings of Muslims’? I don’t see that face, in Europe or in the UN. This is, for me, the main question. People would die once again.”
‘We hope this film will lift the veil of denial about the genocide’
Quo Vadis, Aida? is available to rent through Curzon Home Cinema