Quo vadis, Aida? it is a perfect x-ray of the war – Francesco Boille

A slow movement of the camera from right to left shows a family sitting in the living room, as if to convey a feeling of suspension, then the camera stops. And the face of a woman sitting in an armchair appears. It is Aida, the protagonist of this film, and (pre) announces its essence together with the ending. Aida carries a cross of personal and collective suffering, and is at the same time our witness, the one who sees for all of us, to her own detriment.

Presented in competition in Venice in 2020 (which we had reviewed very positively), nominated for the Oscars and Golden globes as best foreign film, the feature film by Bosnian Jasmila Žbanić is a masterpiece and a lesson in cinema that immediately immerses us in the tragic facts which took place in Srebrenica in July 1995, when the men in command of the one who was called the “butcher of the Balkans” – the Serbian general Ratko Mladić who last June after a trial that lasted years had his sentence of life imprisonment confirmed for genocide (but not only) – they deceived the United Nations and the international community by managing to conquer the Bosnian city of Srebrenica where they caused the death of 8,372 men and boys, victims to whom the film is dedicated together with the remaining women: “Our children, fathers, husbands , brothers, cousins ​​and neighbors ”.

Reality and subtlety of writing
That opening sequence is followed by the cut-off on the movement of tanks in the grass with men in step approaching the city. It is as if the earthquake has arrived, and everyone runs away from home abandoning everything. Soon, excited voices and phrases from the media follow: “Srebrenica is becoming an open-air massacre, every second, three bullets hit”; “17 other victims arrived at the hospital along with 57 injured”; “Will the world ever be able to see the tragedy unfolding in Srebrenica?”. Then we quickly find ourselves in the UN base near the city where much of the drama takes place and where we find the protagonist of the film, Aida, an interpreter for the UN forces who could be defined as a “mother courage” were it not rhetorical.

And in this film it is never the time for rhetoric. With the pursuit of the short flashes described above, the director manages to restore the atmosphere, to give essential information, to describe the environments and the main situations, without this diminishing the scope of the events, without becoming a video clip and sensationalist film. , on the type of Welcome to Sarajevo (1997) by Michael Winterbottom on the siege of Sarajevo seen by a British troupe, and this also thanks to the inclusion of dramaturgical elements (to which the name of the protagonist clearly refers) always perfectly calibrated that do not prevent the emergence of a real refinement despite the need to also be clear, explicit.

Another very strong moment is the shot outside the UN base where a part of the population of the city has taken refuge that the UN peacekeepers do not want to let in: men, women, children and the elderly, remain there, leaning against the gates. It is a multitude that is lost in the horizon and one wonders how the director managed to accomplish even this micro-enterprise within the largest enterprise, that of producing and making the film. If the viewer carefully observes the details of each sequence, he will realize that everything seems true, the individual situations as well as each individual interpreter, even in the smallest part, the Serbian commanders like those of the United Nations.

But above all, Jasmila Žbanić has a more unique than rare ability to be able to bring out the drama from the off screen and isolate small details, rather than from war situations reconstructed in spectacular ways or representing the carnage with attention to every detail. For example, more eloquent than many truculent images, the corpse of a woman killed while she was cooking in the courtyard of the house and the next close-up on the open oven, with the dish she was cooking clearly visible inside, is a detail that plays on the absence: the absence of life in the person and the absence of murder which is left implicit through the presence of a vestige of everyday life (the cooked dish). And Aida, who in the gigantic hangar of the UN base helps the birth of a woman whose waters have broken, best expresses a situation of no life, and at the same time effectively constructs an example of what the approximately 25,000 people imprisoned without food, water and sanitation.

Without interlocutors
Meanwhile, as pressing questions follow one another – “why make it a safe zone if the Serbs enter Srebrenica whenever they want?” – it is emphasized that “they are bombing the city and their soldiers are everywhere now” and that there are other wounded hiding in the basements of the city, Mladić, having arrived in Srebrenica, releases a propaganda video where he declares: “It is July 11, 1995 in the Serbian city of Srebrenica. On the eve of another great Serbian celebration, we make a gift of the city to the Serbian people ”. Rarely has ethnic cleansing been presented so elegantly.

But first we see the impasse in which the Dutch UN contingent suddenly finds itself. The population of the city had been reassured that a NATO bombing would follow if the Serbs tried to enter the city. We see the commander scream with the command on the request for an air strike: “What good is an ultimatum if it is not broadcast?”. The truth is that we are in July and the commander finds no interlocutors. He does not find superiors like General Rupert Smith, the Secretary General and the entire UN command hierarchy are on vacation for the holidays. Or they disappear with this excuse because there is no political unity. The military seem more concerned about their issues and their own safety, from officers to commanders: “They all pretend nothing has happened and now I have to go and negotiate with that beast,” the colonel in the car told his men.

A key moment
The alternation between the penetration of the Serbian military into the UN base, who take advantage of the absence of the commander who went to Ratko Mladić to negotiate, and the place where the negotiations with Mladić take place is in this sense a key moment. The situation in which the Dutch commander finds himself seems to lie on the border between the frightened person and the potential hostage, and in its brevity the alternate montage effectively delineates another fleeting border: that between drama and (sad) paradox inherent in the reconstructed situation.

Everything is in the impasse. The politics of the Western powers and the people waiting in silence outside. Even the air seems still. Two stasis.

While the director works on the contrast between the beauty of nature and human madness, the hangar-prison and the room of the “negotiation” (the quotation marks are more than ever a must) make the film a claustrophobic drama of darkness even if outside there is the warm light of the summer sun, there are the wide spaces of the countryside. A drama that speaks of the particular to better speak of the general, where the intimate drama rises to the universal. The intimate drama is that of Aida, who wants to save her family, at least her two children and her husband, a teacher like Aida. But only she is an effective employee of the United Nations.

For director Jasmila Žbanić, although she already has several short films, documentaries and feature films to her credit, including Esma’s secret (winner of the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2006), writing, directing and co-producing the film was a tough test on several levels also for the feeling of isolation felt. In a dialogue between Žbanić and British director Mike Leigh published by the prestigious French film magazine Positif, the director claims that help has been denied her not only by the Serbian military authorities or by the Serbian mayor of Srebrenica, but also in the Bosnian sphere. The removal of memory is one of the issues that the film takes out, but to put it at the center of the story: there are still many mothers who are looking for the bodies of their children.

The past as a dream, the present as a nightmare
In the same issue of Positif there is a dossier on Rossellini, master of neorealist cinema, in which we are reminded of some essential elements on the cinematic representation of war and death. Especially in the up part Country (1946), the episodic film on the advance of the allied troops from the south to the north of Italy, where it is recalled that in the fourth and sixth episodes the form close to the documentary disappears and gives way to metaphysical transfiguration, and that in the sixth episode it seems Federico Fellini, at the time assistant director and later master of cinema that transfigures reality, was decisive. But above all, he does not indulge in putting death on the field, the slaughtered people: in the first episode we do not see Carmela and the black American soldier die, but we only see the result of the action and their two bodies.

Now, in Aida we suddenly see a musical and joyful sequence on the winner for the best hairstyle of eastern Bosnia 1991-92. It’s a flashback but it feels like a dream. Is oneirism here synonymous with the transfiguration of reality or is it reality that becomes past and now seems an impossible dream? The screams in the night about a gas that would be penetrating the hangar take you back to the real world. The past as a dream, the present as a nightmare.

Exciting and enthralling without cunning, the film questions our lies and our silences, not only Serbian and Bosnian ones, but also those of public opinion, of the international community. In other words, everything is on the pitch because everything is off the pitch. Until the finale today where some children in a theatrical representation following the threads of the invisible, mimic the need to know how to fly with the mind and to open their eyes after closing them. As after a violent quarrel over a hangover, no one seems to understand the reason for that hatred, of that senseless cruelty and everyone seems to be ashamed and want to remove the facts.

The author’s desire to revive the memory of what happened and at the same time to prevent it from happening again is evident, given the proliferation of populisms with poisonous messages that have pervaded our societies for decades. Although behind the vote to them there is often a profound social malaise, we must be aware that whenever the vote is handed over to political groups that convey hatred and fear towards the different or towards the other, we create the potential so that sooner or later new horrors are produced, perhaps in the most unexpected manner and at the most unexpected moment, a senseless circularity of history that here is symbolically meant to stop. To remind us, in this film of faces, is the marked, lived-in face of a woman, Aida. An interpreter. But an interpreter of all of us.