By JOÃO LANARI BO*
Commentary on the film by Jasmila Zbanic
Quo vadis? The expression is from Latin, the dead language that lies underground in our linguistic unconscious: Wikipedia, the herald of digital knowledge, reports that the expression comes from an account in the apocryphal gospel known as “The Acts of Peter”, in which, while fleeing a probable crucifixion in Rome, Saint Peter finds the resurrected Jesus and asks: “Quo vadis?” And Jesus answers: “Romans are crucified” (“I am going to Rome to be crucified again”).
Peter gave up his escape, returned to Rome and was crucified upside down.”Quo vadis“It also resonates in the world of cinema: based on the book of the same name published in Poland in 1895, six versions have been produced – among them the best known, from 1951, with Deborah Kerr and Robert Taylor, which won an Oscar: Christians suffering under hungry lions and Nero's pyromania.”How are you, Aida?”, the film by Jasmila Zbanic, a courageous Bosnian filmmaker, updates the question to the tragic recent past of the maddening civil war that hit the territories of the former Yugoslavia in the first half of the 1990s.
Update in the most radical sense possible: your film seems to be inspired by one of those lurid accounts of the Old testment da Bible, in which cities and populations were decimated in the name of ethnic-religious purity. The contemporary massacre went down in history as the Srebrenica genocide, the worst in the West since the Second World War: it took place between 11 and 25 July 1995, when 8 Bosnian Muslims, from teenagers to the elderly, were executed or disappeared by militiamen disguised as military forces composed of Bosnian citizens of Serbian origin, supported by Serbia.
Srebrenica is a small mountain town with Roman bridges and Byzantine architecture, in the far east of Bosnia: its main economic activities are (or were) salt mining and tourism, through nearby spas – one of them, the Vilina Vlas hotel, was the headquarters of militia commandos and the scene of at least 200 rapes and murders of Muslim women, in 1992 (after the conflict, it reopened).
How are you, Aida? organizes its narrative based on what the interpreter Aida sees, serving with the UN peacekeeping forces in Srebrenica: the city was declared in April 1993 “an area free from any armed attack or any other hostile act”, under the protection of a small and fragile unit of Dutch military personnel, Aida's leaders.
The troops commanded by General Ratko Mladic were not impressed by this international norm and carried out the massacre in the two weeks of July 1995. The balance between the fictional particularity of Aida's family and the collective nature of the tragedy is one of the film's strengths: rarely has the opening caption "based on real events and fictional characters" been so appropriate.
Aida’s moral dilemma – should she save her loved ones, her husband and two children, by using her international employee badge and appealing to dubious exceptions, or should she resign herself to the collective drama that was looming? – places the biblical reference at the heart of the character. In a world where the limits of human coexistence have been ignored or blatantly abolished, what is the meaning of the dilemma? Where are you going, Aida?
Ratko Mladic is one of the most sinister characters in the annals of human violence. He managed to remain a fugitive for fifteen years after the conflict in Bosnia ended through a multilateral peace agreement in late 1995: Serbia and the United States offered five million euros for information leading to the capture of the general, who was finally arrested in 2011. He was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. How are you, Aida?, his character gives one of the best performances in the film, alongside the hesitant Dutch colonel and, of course, Aida.
After this era of catastrophes, Bosnia and Herzegovina reformed itself politically into a federation with two politically autonomous entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska (not to be confused with Serbia proper). To this day, UN forces remain in the geographically divided country to ensure compliance with the 1995 agreement. According to estimates, 45% of the population is Muslim, 36% Serb Orthodox and 15% Catholic: allowing for statistical error, this is the religious divide that haunts Bosnia.
In 2018, journalist of the The Guardian visited the area and found the following: “TripAdvisor reviews of the Vilina Vlas hotel are mixed. Only a few mention the rape scene it once was – and if you don’t speak French or German, you won’t even notice. The rest are a mix of mundane complaints about dirty rooms and enthusiastic tributes to the forest and its natural hot springs.”
*João Lanari Bo He is a professor of cinema at the Faculty of Communication at the University of Brasília (UnB). Author, among other books, of Cinema for Russians, Cinema for Soviets (Time Bazaar) [https://amzn.to/45rHa9F]
Reference
How are you, Aida?
Germany, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2020, 104 minutes.
Direction and Screenplay: Jasmila Zbanic.
Cast: Jasna Đuričić, Izudin Bajrović, Boris Isaković, Johan Heldenbergh,
Raymond Thiry, Boris Ler.
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