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    Jasmila Zbanic Is Vilified in Serbia and ‘Disobedient’ at Home

    Jasmila Zbanic, named Europe’s best director for “Quo Vadis, Aida?”, insists on blaming individuals, not ethnic groups, for atrocities done as Yugoslavia imploded, a stance that can anger all sides.SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina — A celebrated Bosnian film director always knew her latest movie, the harrowing drama of a mother trying unsuccessfully to save her husband and two sons from the Srebrenica massacre in 1995, would be panned by Serb nationalists.But the filmmaker, Jasmila Zbanic, was still taken aback when Serbian media invited a convicted war criminal to opine on the movie, “Quo Vadis, Aida?”, for which she recently won Europe’s best director award.The chosen critic? Veselin Sljivancanin, a former Yugoslav army officer sentenced to prison by a tribunal in The Hague for aiding and abetting the murder of prisoners in Croatia in the Vukovar massacre.While asking such a notorious figure to comment on the movie was a surprise, his reaction to it wasn’t: He denounced it as lies that “incite ethnic hatred” and smear all Serbs.“He, a war criminal, wants all Serbs, most of whom had nothing to do with his crimes, to feel attacked for his crimes,” Ms. Zbanic said in a recent interview at her production company atop a hill overlooking Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. “He is putting his guilt on all Serbs.”Ms. Zbanic speaking after the first public showing of “Quo Vadis, Aida?” in 2020 in Srebrenica, where some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred in 1995.Kemal Softic/Associated PressMs. Zbanic’s unwavering belief that the guilt for the atrocities committed as the former Yugoslavia split apart belongs to individuals, not ethnic groups, has also made her a difficult cultural icon for some in her own community of Bosnian Muslims, known as Bosniaks, to embrace.When the European Film Academy last month gave her the award of best director and selected “Quo Vadis, Aida?” as Europe’s best film of the year, a few Bosniak politicians congratulated her on their personal Facebook pages, but there were no official celebrations of the kind held whenever Bosniak athletes triumph abroad.“I did not even get any flowers,” she said.Fiercely independent and a self-declared feminist, Ms. Zbanic has for years kept her distance from Bosnia’s dominant and male-dominated political force, the Party of Democratic Action, or S.D.A., a Bosniak nationalist group. Like Serb parties on the other side of the ethnic divide, the S.D.A. now wins votes by stirring animosity toward, and fear of, other groups.“I’m very much against S.D.A., the main political party, so they know I am not theirs,” she said, noting that she had several times selected ethnic Serb actors for starring roles in her movies. “I don’t choose actors because of their nationality but because they are the best,” she said.In her most recent movie, the main role, a Bosniak translator working for the United Nations in Srebrenica, is played by Jasna Djuricic from Serbia. Ms. Djuricic, who won the best actress award from the European Film Academy, has been pilloried in Serb media as a Muslim-loving traitor.The actress Jasna Djuricic, left, with Ms. Zbanic on the set of “Quo Vadis, Aida?” Ms. Djuricic has been called a traitor in her native Serbia.Imrana Kapetanovic/DeblokadaHaris Pasovic, a prominent Bosnian theater director and Ms. Zbanic’s professor during the war years at the Sarajevo Academy of Performing Arts, said his former student’s collaboration with the Serbian actress demonstrated her faith that culture transcends nationalism.“Events were meant to separate these two people forever, but they came together to create this incredible work of art,” Mr. Pasovic said.International acclaim, he added, has made Ms. Zbanic “the most successful woman in Bosnian history” and, as a result, “she terrifies Balkan politicians,” nearly all men. “She is very careful not to be used in Balkan political trading and has never wanted to be part of anybody’s bloc,” Mr. Pasovic said.Bosnia has a long, rich history of filmmaking from when it was still part of Yugoslavia, the multiethnic socialist state that fell apart in the early 1990s and spawned Europe’s bloodiest armed conflict since World War II. More than 140,000 died in the ensuing conflicts.“What I learned during the war is that food and culture are equal,” Ms. Zbanic said. “You can’t live without either.”Like so much else in Bosnia, a patchwork of different ethnic groups and religions, the film industry has been left bitterly divided by the traumas of war. Emir Kusturica, a well-known Sarajevo-born director who has embraced Serb nationalism, is now reviled by many Bosniaks as a champion of “Greater Serbia,” the cause that tore Bosnia apart in the 1990s.Ms. Zbanic, 47, said she despised Mr. Kusturica’s politics — he is close to Milorad Dodik, the belligerent nationalist leader of Bosnia’s Serb-controlled region — but still respected his talents. “We should appreciate professionals no matter what ideology they have,” she said.Seventeen years old when Bosnian Serbs began a nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo in 1992, Ms. Zbanic said her films, which include “Grbavica,” a 2006 feature about a single mother whose daughter was conceived in a wartime rape, are her “attempt to understand what happened and how what happened during the war is still influencing our everyday life.”Ms. Zbanic speaking to cast members on the set of “Quo Vadis, Aida?”Imrana Kapetanovic/Deblokada“Grbavica” helped pressure Bosnian politicians into changing the law to give previously neglected wartime rape victims the same official recognition and allowances as former soldiers. She counts that as one of her proudest achievements, noting that “truth is always good, even if it is painful and even if it hurts, it moves things forward.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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    ‘Quo Vadis, Aida?’ Review: Life and Death in Srebrenica

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s pick‘Quo Vadis, Aida?’ Review: Life and Death in SrebrenicaBosnia and Herzegovina’s Oscar entry is the harrowing and rigorous story of a U.N. translator’s fight to save her family from slaughter.Jasna Djuricic is Aida, a high school teacher turned U.N. translator, in Jasmila Zbanic’s “Quo Vadis, Aida?”Credit…Super LTDMarch 11, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETQuo Vadis, Aida?NYT Critic’s PickDirected by Jasmila ZbanicDrama, History, War1h 41mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.In July 1995, the Bosnian Serb army, under the command of Gen. Ratko Mladic, overran the town of Srebrenica, which had been declared a safe haven by the United Nations. Muslim civilians sought refuge at a nearby U.N. base, but were handed over to Mladic’s soldiers, who separated them by gender and loaded them into buses and trucks. Around 8,000 men and boys were murdered, their bodies buried in mass graves, in one of the worst atrocities of the wars that convulsed the former Yugoslavia for much of the decade.At the time, many in the West wondered how this could happen — how genocidal violence could erupt in Europe barely 50 years after the end of World War II. “Quo Vadis, Aida?,” Jasmila Zbanic’s unsparing and astonishing new film, shows precisely how. This isn’t the same as explaining why, though Zbanic’s granular, hour-by-hour, lightly fictionalized dramatization of the events leading up to the massacre sheds some glancing light on that question.Mladic (Boris Isakovic) is an unnervingly familiar figure. A self-infatuated bully who travels everywhere with a cameraman, he punctuates his displays of power with litanies of grievance. But the movie isn’t really about him. He and his officers may be the authors of the nightmare, but the viewer suffers through it in the company of Aida Selmanagic (Jasna Duricic), who works as a translator for the U.N.[embedded content]In her previous life, Aida was a teacher. Her husband, Nihad (Izudin Bajrovic), was the principal of the local high school. At one especially tense moment, she and a Serb soldier exchange polite greetings: he’s a former student, who sends regards to Aida’s sons, Hamdija (Boris Ler) and Sejo (Dino Bajrovic). That encounter is one of several reminders of the prewar normal, when Serbs and Muslims lived side by side and Aida and her family pursued an uneventful middle-class existence. A flashback shows her participating in a whimsical pageant devoted to “Eastern Bosnia’s best hairstyle.”Now, she runs an increasingly desperate gantlet of contradictory demands. Her U.N. identification badge affords her some protection, which she tries to extend to her husband and children. She persuades Nihad to volunteer as a civilian delegate alongside the U.N. commander in farcical negotiations with Mladic, and uses her access to restricted areas of the base to find hiding places for Sejo and Hamdija.In her official capacity, Aida dutifully translates Serbian lies and U.N. equivocations, a role that becomes both horrific and absurd. She must convey to the panicked masses at the base — some of them her friends and neighbors — reassurances that she knows to be false. Amid the promises of safety, she can see clearly what is about to happen.Duricic’s performance is somehow both charismatic and self-effacing. Aida is tenacious and resourceful, and also terrified and overwhelmed by circumstances. The story she is caught up in moves swiftly and relentlessly, but sometimes nothing seems to move at all. The victims-in-waiting are trapped. Their ostensible protectors are paralyzed, and the predators are in no particular hurry. Who can stop them?There is relentless, dread-fueled suspense here, and a kind of procedural efficiency that reminds me of Paul Greengrass’s fact-based films, like “Bloody Sunday” and “United 93.” The rigorous honesty of “Quo Vadis, Aida?” is harrowing, partly because it subverts many of the expectations that quietly attach themselves to movies about historical trauma. We often watch them not to be confronted with the cruelty of history, but to be comforted with redemptive tales of resistance, resilience and heroism.Aida may have some of those qualities, but her brave attempts to escape only emphasize how trapped she really is. The title asks where she is going. The available answers are grim. If she can save herself, can she also save her family? And if so, what about the thousands of others whose lives are in peril?Her situation is dramatized with exquisite empathy. Pity isn’t the only emotion in play; it does battle with shame and disgust. The failure of the U.N. is almost as appalling as Mladic’s viciousness. The rule-bound, well-meaning Dutch officers in charge of the base become the general’s hostages and then his accomplices. The massacre was a war crime supervised by peacekeepers — a failure of institutional resolve, of humanity, of civilization.Eventually, Mladic was tried in The Hague and sentenced to life in prison. The final act of “Quo Vadis, Aida,” Bosnia and Herzegovina’s official Oscar entry, makes clear that many other perpetrators escaped with impunity. The war ended, and some version of normalcy returned, but Zbanic takes no consolation in the banal observation that life goes on. It’s true that time passes, that memory fades, that history is a record of mercy as well as of savagery. But it’s also true — as this unforgettable film insists — that loss is permanent and unanswerable.Quo Vadis, Aida?Not rated. In Bosnian, English and Dutch, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch through Angelika’s virtual cinema.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More