Mark Reviews Movies: QUO VADIS, AIDA?

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 11, 2021

Writer/director Jasmila Zbanic has made a film of absolutely righteous anger, but the most striking thing about the filmmaker's approach in Quo Vadis, Aida?, about a massacre during the Bosnian War, is how calmly that anger is communicated. It's a statement of near-total condemnation, presented in an almost cold style of pure observation. The story itself is infuriating on multiple levels. Zbanic knows she simply must show it as it happened.

The obvious targets of the film's ire here are members of the Bosnian Serb Army, who expelled tens of thousands of civilians from their homes and killed some 8,000 people in and near the town of Srebrenica in 1995—a few months before the conflict would end. Less than ten years later, an international tribunal would rule the killings a genocide, since the victims were almost exclusively men and boys of the Bosniak people—most of them Muslim.

Zbanic's screenplay offers no such official closure. The wounds and consequences of this act of genocide—one of many that occurred throughout the region over the course of the war—remain at the end, and there is no sense of them healing or finding any real consolation.

The other target of the film's anger is revealed at the start, although it takes some time to truly understand the reason for that rage, based on depths of incompetence, inaction, and apathy. In the film's opening scene, our protagonist Aida Selmanagic (Jasna Djuricic), a local teacher working as a translator for the United Nations, is helping two parties communicate during a meeting. On one side, there's a trio of locals from Srebrenica, knowing that Serbian soldiers are fast approaching their town. On the other side, there are officers with a Dutch military battalion under the command of the UN as a peacekeeping force.

The townspeople want assurances that they will be safe. The UN officials note that they have given the Bosnian Serb Army an ultimatum: If they enter Srebrenica, NATO airstrikes will put a stop to them.

The townspeople point out that they have heard such promises before, when Serbian forces were attacking, starving, and killing the population. The best Colonel Karremans (Johan Heldenbergh) can offer is a reminder that Srebrenica is officially a "safe area" and yet another re-assertion that the ultimatum should deter the Serbian army. Aida sits between the two groups, not giving away any of her feelings on the matter.

The ultimatum doesn't stop the siege, of course, and artillery explodes and people fleeing from town are gunned down in the streets (Zbanic makes a deliberate point not to show any of the violence—only suggesting it, with the sights and sounds of automatic rifle fire, or presenting its consequence, such as the devastating sight of a murdered woman lying on concrete near her confused dog). As the attack continues, Aida's husband Nihad (Izudin Barjrovic) and two sons, the elder Hamdija (Boris Ler) and the younger Sejo (Dino Bajrovic), rush to pack essentials from the family apartment.

They, along with about 20,000 other people in town, are going to the UN base just outside of town. When several thousand civilians have entered the facility, the soldiers shut the gate. Sejo made it inside, but Nihad and Hamdija are among the throngs standing outside the perimeter, waiting for something to be done to help them.

The rest of this story plays out almost as a kind of thriller, as Aida attempts to reunite her family within the base and, later, to find a way for them to leave it safely. The stakes here are as high as they could be, but the real point of Zbanic framing this real-life story in such a way is to highlight the constant feeling of uncertainty, the increasing sense of frustration, and an inevitable slide toward helplessness and hopelessness.

Aida finds a way to get her husband and older son inside, offering up Nihad as a volunteer to negotiate on behalf of the townspeople with the cunningly ruthless General Mladic (Boris Isakovic). Karremans, irritated that the airstrikes were denied and that entire UN Security Council is on vacation, hates the idea of negotiating with such a "monster," but his hands are tied.

That's his position, at least. As all of this unfolds, though, the amount of UN officials and the number of times that they argue that nothing can be done, because of orders or a lack thereof, paint of a damning picture of strategic neglect and moral failure. There's a horrifying indifference to too many of these officers and soldiers, only partially excused by the fact that the UN and NATO have left them ill-equipped and only able to offer empty promises.

A Serbian officer arrives at the base, demanding to inspect the civilians within, and Karremans, still sitting at the table with Mladic, orders his second-in-command Franken (Raymond Thiry) to allow it. Mladic sends busses to transport the refugees, and Karremans simply lets the general walk all over his previous guarantees about the civilians' safety. The Dutch colonel then hides in his office, while other soldiers watch men and boys being led for summary execution within feet of the base, find dead bodies, or even give up a teenage boy disguised as a girl to the Serbian soldiers.

Zbanic merely shows this to us with the objectivity of an impartial observer, because that is all that's required for such horrors and such seeming disinterest in them to make an impact. The filmmaker also has Aida's story, a harrowing and ultimately devastating depiction of navigating too many layers of red tape, and Djuricic's performance, an incredible depiction of trying to keep a cool head under unthinkable pressure and rage, to serve as the film's true, unfiltered censure of both the killers and those who essentially allowed too much of this to happen.

It did happen, and Quo Vadis, Aida? shows how it did with clarity and precision. By the end, there are no excuses, no rationalizations, and no consolations that can balance the pain of someone who has nowhere else to go but to an empty, ruined home.

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