Twenty-five years after the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995, those tragic events are dramatized in Quo Vadis, Aida? by Bosnian director Jasmila Žbanić. It is a masterpiece, achieving both emotional intensity and historical insight: a balance which few—if any—previous films about genocide have managed to realize.
The film was Bosnia and Hercegovina’s candidate for an Oscar in the Foreign Film category. It was the subject of a panel discussion at the Harriman Institute on January 15, 2021, featuring the director, several academics, and human rights activists.Footnote 1
Žbanić chose to tell the story through a fictional character, the interpreter Aida. (In reality there were no female interpreters in Srebrenica.) Aida is present as the hapless UN peacekeepers negotiate with Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladić to stave off catastrophe. (The Dutch commanders are identified by their real names—Lt. Col. Thom Karremans and Maj. Rob Franken.) Their calls for UN airstrikes to hold back the attackers go unanswered. Mladić’s forces enter the town and separate the women from the men. The former are bussed to safety, while the latter are sent to their deaths. Most of the action in the film takes place on July 11, the day the town fell.
The fictional Aida’s husband and two sons come to the UN compound, and the second half of the film focuses on Aida’s increasingly desperate and ultimately unsuccessful efforts to save them. The Dutch refuse to evacuate them in their convoy.
There is one brief flashback scene in which Aida remembers happier times, a New Year’s Eve party in 1991. The camera lingers on the faces of the revelers, one after the other. We know what will happen to them: it is asking us to remember them as people, and not just as victims.
The film concludes with a coda years later in which Aida identifies the remains of her menFootnote 2 and returns to her former apartment and her former job as a teacher. The segment addresses the painful question of how to carry on living after genocide. Equally important, how will future generations understand their country’s history, and how will that understanding shape their future behavior? The final scene is a school concert, with former perpetrators and victims sitting in the audience as their kids perform on stage. It is intensely ambiguous. At one level it shows hope, that children are the future. But the camera pans over the kids’ faces in a way that mirrors the flashback scene from the dance party. We are left wondering: will they grow up to repeat the experiences of their parents?
Žbanić studied eyewitness accounts, reports, and news film footage from the time to reconstruct the events of that day with what appears to be great accuracy and verisimilitude.Footnote 3 (She told the Harriman panel that Karremans and Franken refused an interview with her.)
The film does not directly show any killing. When the film premiered in Srebrenica on October 10, 2020, Žbanić explained, “I was not seduced by the spectacle of war.”Footnote 4 She is aware of the perverse attraction of cinematic depictions of violence, something that mars even ostensibly anti-war films (“trauma porn”). She told the Harriman forum that “from a woman’s perspective all these male heroes look ridiculous.”
She keeps the camera at eye level, abstaining from crane shots, so we get an uncanny sense of what it would be like to find oneself in that situation. (Of course, such a feeling is a shallow artifact, and nothing like the reality.)
At several points, perpetrators and victims greet each other: a reminder that they previously lived together as one community. There is one lingering shot in which Aida stares at one of the bus drivers, casually smoking. Later, a family sits on their balcony drinking coffee, while across the street men are being massacred in a warehouse. You don’t need to have read Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) to understand the banality of evil.
The Mladić character toggles between intimidation and assurances that the captives will be taken to safety. He brings food to the compound and has a camera team in tow to create his own narrative for posterity.Footnote 5 This portrayal of Mladić and his troops is important for two reasons. First, it shows how the operation was planned, organized, and directed. If you want to kill 8,000 people in a couple of days, this is how you do it.
Second, it shows how evil people play on the innocence and optimism of others, both victims and bystanders. We hope for the best, while they plan for the worst.
There have been several previous efforts to capture the horrors of the Bosnian war on screen, such as Pretty Village, Pretty Flame (1996), No Man’s Land (2001), The Enclave (2002), Snow (2008), and Angelina Jolie’s In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011). Quo Vadis, Aida? is in a class of its own. It stands up well alongside Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust classic, Schindler’s List (1993). In a way it is more honest, since Schindler’s List contrived to come up with an upbeat ending, focusing on survivors. Many Western films include an outside figure—a journalist, an aid worker—with whom the viewer can identify. In this movie, we see the events through Aida’s eyes.
This is the fourth film of Jasmila Žbanić (born in Sarajevo in 1974). She trained as a clown and puppeteer in the USA before making a documentary short, Red Rubber Boots, about a Bosnian mother searching for her two missing children. Her 2006 debut feature Grbavica about Bosnian rape victims won a prize at the Berlin film festival.
Of course, one film cannot take on all the important questions surrounding the genesis of genocide. Why were the killers behaving in this way? Is it a universal human characteristic, or were there specific circumstances which led to this outcome? In the film, some of the Serbian soldiers say things like “We have been fighting for four years.” But the claim that Bosniak soldiers were storing weapons in the UN safe zone and conducting raids on nearby Serb villages is not addressed. We see the fruitless efforts of Col. Kammerman to call in airstrikes, but we do not get any explanation of why the UN created these “safe havens” without providing the backing they needed to guarantee security. In the Netherlands in 2002 an official report concluded that the UN and Dutch government of the time shared some responsibility for the tragedy, which led to the resignation of the Wim Kok government.Footnote 6
There are still many Serbs who deny that the massacre took place, and/or glorify the perpetrators as heroes. It is unlikely that the film will be shown in cinemas in Republika Srpska and Serbia, though it will be available through video on demand. Hopefully some will see it, and it may bring them to question the alternative reality in which they are living. At the Harriman discussion, Dijana Jelača (Brooklyn College) argued that cinema can play an important role in bearing witness and countering denial, while also evoking empathy and identification with the other. Quo Vadis, Aida? will certainly fulfill that role.
