‘Aida’ grippingly recounts a tragedy
In “Quo Vadis, Aida?,” Jasmila Zbanic’s swift and shattering movie about the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, a woman climbs onto a small structure and stares out over a barbed-wire fence into a sea of weary bodies and frightened faces. This is Aida (Jasna Duricic), and she’s searching for some of her family members, but as the camera pans across the crowd, echoing her desperate gaze, the enormity of the tragedy at hand comes into focus.
It’s not the last time Aida will experience this elevated vantage, sometimes with a megaphone in hand as she translates instructions and information for her fellow refugees. She knows her words are worthless, a mix of vague reassurances and outright lies; she also knows that, under the circumstances, hearing the truth might be just as futile.
Crowd shots in wartime movies, from “Gone With the Wind” to more recent digital-extra spectaculars, run the risk of numbing the viewer, of overwhelming us with so many heartrending details that they turn mass suffering into abstraction. But the details somehow never blur in “Quo Vadis, Aida?,” which manages to hold background and foreground in unsettling balance for 102 taut, terrifying minutes.
Zbanic, who wrote and directed the film (and just earned a British Film Academy nomination for best director), doesn’t take a panoramic approach. She keeps her focus on Aida, a Srebrenica schoolteacher turned United Nations interpreter working on behalf of a town she suspects is doomed and trying to spare her family the same fate. But the bigger picture never recedes into the smaller one. As Aida races the clock, it becomes clear that her family’s survival, if it comes to pass, will be a rare and privileged exception.
The story opens in July 1995 in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, declared a demilita