‘Punk was my weapon’: the rebel power of culture in siege of Sarajevo
As a radio operator during the siege of Sarajevo, Boris Siber made use of music to blast the enemy airwaves and destroy their communication. “The Clash, Jimi Hendrix and the Sex Pistols, as loud as possible on the frequencies they were using … they changed frequency, then I found them again. That was my task.”
Siber – a member of a hit Yugoslav comedy troupe before the war forced its breakup – also kept up civilian and military morale as a radio comic. “Music and mic were my weapons.”
Enes Zlatar Bure was a firefighter by day, helping to extinguish fires caused by exploding ammunition, a position he volunteered for as an alternative to going to fight. By night in the blockaded city, he was the frontman with the punk rock band Sikter. “Our punk rock was a weapon to say: fuck you … you can’t do anything to us. Yeah you can, you can keep on shooting at us, killing us … but we will tell you fuck you, anyway.”
The two are among an underground community of Sarajevans who recall in a new documentary film the almost 47 months they spent trapped in their city between 1992 and 1996 under constant enemy fire from Serbian nationalists, and how culture became their key to resistance and survival.
Kiss the Future, directed by Nenad Cicin-Sain, which had its premiere at the Berlin film festival, has brought together musicians, artists and journalists who used music and art to rebel against their imprisonment and to assert their right to a multicultural identity amid Serb nationalist attempts to destroy them and their cultural heritage.
Cicin-Sain, who was born in Slovenia to a Serbian mother and Croatian father, said he had been inspired by the rise of nationalism around the world to grapple with the story, and felt it was timely to bring it to a new audience. “Our intention was to humanise what it was like to go through something so horrific but in that darkness to find the most beautiful signs of humanity,” he told the Guardian.
“Even in the darkest of times, people used music and art as a form of rebellion and survival and to help others. They wanted to find purpose, to feel human, to feel normal.”
The protagonists recount their daily struggles avoiding sniper fire, living without water, electricity, gas and heat amid shortages of food, fuel and medicines. At night they took refuge and
sought each other’s company in underground clubs and bars, risking their lives as they ran through sniper zones even just to reach the venues.
Zlatar Bure recalls how Sikter, his band, played in a club called Obala that took on a legendary status. “We would go there and we would play. People would come and listen; they would have fun. It was kind of like teleporting to another place, like Amsterdam or Berlin, London or New York,” he said at the film festival. “None of us thought about what’s going on outside. It was like a capsule and that’s what kept us sane all the time.”
He recalled how if the owners of Obale were able to get hold of petrol to run their generator, they would summon the musicians for a gig.
With Sarajevo surrounded on all sides by tanks and snipers, deaths and injuries were a daily reality, he said. “Our bass player came to me one day and said: ‘Oh, our drummer, he lost his hand on the frontline.’ So what did he do? He duct-taped the drumstick to the stump so that he could play – he still plays like that now.”
Gino Jevđević, a Balkan punk rock musician, composer and playwright who staged an adaptation of the musical Hair that was performed almost daily during the war, recalled: “The audience literally risked their lives, running from the different bridges to the theatre. Our sound guy died before one of those performances.”
Vesna Andree Zaimović, a journalist at Radio Sarajevo who acted as a researcher for the film, said making it had ultimately been like a healing process but also a painful experience, especially when the Russian invasion of Ukraine occurred when filming was about to start, reigniting post-traumatic stress disorder in a number of the Bosnian film crew. But she said the Ukrainians’ fight for freedom had given even more purpose to the project.
“Our story is a moment of history,” she said. “But it’s also an issue that is relevant and essential for the global political situation today. Everything that happened 30 years ago is deeply connected to the events that are happening close by today.”
The longest siege in modern history is estimated to have cost the lives of almost 14,000 people, including more than 1,600 children. It was brought to an end by the Dayton peace agreement, halting nearly four years of war between Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks.
Zaimović’s message to those enduring the conflict in Ukraine and elsewhere, she said, was to remember “you are on the right side of civilisation”. She recalled how her then boyfriend, and now husband, Senad Zaimović, would try to shield her from sniper fire on their daily walk to work at a TV station. He was editor-in-chief of War Art, a daily programme covering all aspects of culture from fashion shows to comedy, and which broadcast from the city via satellite as a deliberate act of cultural resistance. “I was young and in love, so it was a clash between the most elevating feelings that a woman can have and the most brutal horror of the siege of destruction, and this is how most of us in Sarajevo felt,” she said.
Cicin-Sain said he had feared the project might have to be called off for security reasons amid concerns of Russian nationalism triggering an aggressive response from Kremlin allies in Serbia due to the conflict in Ukraine.
The US actor Matt Damon, one of the film’s producers, said he was honoured to be associated with the project. “It was an incredibly moving experience watching the uncut interviews,” he said.
The film culminates in a 1997 concert held by U2 after the group was lobbied during the siege by Bill Carter, a US aid worker affiliated with a maverick humanitarian circus NGO. Much of the documentary is based on his book, Fools Rush In. Attended by about 45,000 people from around former Yugoslavia who flocked to the city, the concert was only possible due to the thousands of steelworkers, truck drivers and construction workers who did everything from reconstructing bridges to renovating the Olympic stadium so the band could reach the war-torn city and for it to host the concert. Across the country, people came out on to the streets to welcome the band and their entourage as they travelled to Sarajevo.
The Irish group’s lead singer, Bono, who had visited the city in secret during the war at the end of 1995, expressed his admiration for the Sarajevans in an interview with Carter, saying they were the definition of the phrase “grace under pressure”.
The title of the film comes from a speech Bono delivered to the ecstatic crowd at the concert, his voice hoarse from emotion, in which he told them: “Fuck the past, kiss the future.”
Sikter, Zlatar Bure’s band, were chosen as the supporting act and opened the show with a punk rock version of the Bosnian national anthem. “If you ask me, that was the most emotional moment,” Zlatar Bure said.