Quo Vadis, Aida?: Oscar-Chosen Drama on Grim Chapter in Bosnian War Nails Emotional Tenor
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A
Bosnian director Jasmila Žbanić succeeds where many filmmakers fail in conveying the dimensions of a mass atrocity in a film that matches clear-eyed personal experience to history in a lightly fictionalized story.
Her film, Quo Vadis, Aida? (Where Are You Going, Aida?) — which is nominated for this year’s Best International Picture Academy Award — depicts the steps leading up to the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of more than 8,000 mostly men and boys, a war crime that has made the one-time Yugoslav spa town a byword for modern genocide.
During the Bosnian war (1992-1995), the town had been taken by Serb forces and recaptured by Bosnians. It was declared a UN safe zone in 1993, overseen by a small Dutch unit not allowed to use force to protect the population, a policy that in essence permitted the massacre to happen.
The ethical issues about the depiction of atrocity are handled with sensitive intelligence here. In a master stroke, Žbanić created a protagonist who has both a professional overview of and a deeply personal stake in what unfolds.
The film focuses on Aida (Jasna Đuričić, in a quietly steely performance), a middle-aged former schoolteacher turned translator at the Dutch-run UN base. In the opening scene, we see her speaking in English, translating between the increasingly agitated Bosnian Muslim leadership and the oblivious UN base commanders, who insist that the Serb army will face instant air strikes if they invade. Aida’s job and all-important UN pass allows her access to the official channels and real and false information.
We also see that she is a well-known local figure in the small town. Some young Serbian soldiers recognize their former teacher and great her by name and send regards to her family. The family includes her husband Nihad (Izudin Barjović), a former high school principal, and two military-age sons, Sejo (Dino Barjović) and Hamdija (Boris Ler). Aida uses all her UN connections to try to keep them alive.
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Tautly edited by Jaroslaw Kaminski (Ida, Cold War), the film records a situation of constant tension and barely controlled chaos, as the Serb army presses closer; four- to five-thousand refugees are inside the UN base, with another 25,000 frightened families crowded around the chain link perimeter.
When the UN fails to deliver promised airstrikes against the surrounding Serb army, the swaggering General Ratko Mladic (Boris Isaković), followed by his own camera crew, declares victory and begins dictating the rules of surrender. If a single bullet is fired against his forces, he declares, the entire UN base will be destroyed.
The pathetically ineffectual Dutch commander Colonel Karremans is on the phone through the night, trying to get relief. “What happened to the air strikes? …. Where’s the Secretary General? … You have to get me someone to talk to?.... You are telling me the entire UN chain of command is vacationing? … What should I do then?”
In the end, the blue-helmeted “peace-keepers” end up as complicit with the murderers. And Aida, in translating the lies of invaders to the defenceless refugees is entangled as well.
Yet, for all its time-ticking sequence of events, Quo Vadis, Aida? is not entirely a blow-by-blow account. There are also moments of reflection, conversations about what people will do after the war, a night of chain-smoking and sipping from flasks of whisky, waiting for someone else to make a fateful decision.
At one point, Aida begins laughing to herself, as she drifts off into a dream-memory of participating in a silly “best hairstyle of 1991-1992” contest at a local bar, pre-war. In this abstract but memorable sequence, where the happy faces of the dancing crowd suddenly look gravely serious as if looking into their future, she’s wakened to the screams of a refugee having a nightmare.
Though we know where this going, the tension ratchets up to a new intensity. Even as General Mladic is supposedly negotiating the terms of surrender, his heavily armed soldiers bully their way past the helpless UN guards and onto the base, on the pretence of looking for Bosnian soldiers.
When Mladic shows up to the refugee site, the Serb soldiers hand out Toblerone bars to the crowd, before beginning to separate the men and women. While the UN commander Karremans protests, the Serb army begin loading men and women on buses, supposedly to go to a safe nearby town. What happened subsequently mercifully takes place off-screen.
The film takes its enigmatic title from a Christian traditional story of the apostle Peter who, while fleeing Rome, meets the risen Christ on the road and asks him where he is going. Christ replies that he is returning to Rome to be crucified again, which gives Peter the strength to return to city where he was martyred.
In the film’s extended afterward, Aida too, returns to the scene of the calamity, to continue her life as a teacher, the profession mandated to hand down the lessons from the past, no matter how difficult, for the benefit of the future.
Quo Vadis, Aida? Directed and written by Jasmila Žbanić. Starring Jasna Đuričić, Izudin Bajrović, Boris Ler, Dino Bajrović, Boris Isaković. Available from April 6 on all digital video platforms including Digital TIFF Bell Lightbox and iTunes.