'Quo Vadis, Aida?': A formidable X-ray of the Srebrenica massacre

There are no possible nuances in the Srebrenica genocide: during the Balkan war in July 1995, faced with the passivity of the Dutch UN peacekeepers, the troops of Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic

some 8,300 Bosnian Muslims - the vast majority, men - were murdered in a city that had been declared "safe" by the United Nations.

More information

• Jasmila Žbanić: “The massacres in Bosnia are part of the history of Europe, although many politicians do not want to see it”

• The discreet monsters of the 20th century

The excellent Bosnian director Jasmila Žbanić, who had already approached the ethnic, political, territorial, social and family conflicts of the defunct Yugoslavia in the remarkable

(2010) and in the magnificent

(2006), has filmed the prolegomena , the methodology, the subterfuges and the consequences of the massacre in the shocking

, focusing on the figure of a local translator at the service of the UN, and with Mladic, today in prison after a life sentence by the International Criminal Court, as a secondary but central role.

Now, if there are no possible nuances, how can you shoot such barbarism? How to represent the monster and its prey? Žbanić seems to have had it clear in all aspects: no deaths on the screen, playing the card of the out of field (each murder, out of the camera's eye and, therefore, out of the viewer's eye). What nothing contributes, neither in information nor in emotion, is left in the margin. Also with a camera on his shoulder, a dizzying X-ray of pain, fear and anger, following almost at all times the female protagonist, a high school teacher converted into a translator, who meets some of her former students on the side of the murderers. So are civil wars: cruel and irrational. All this, with the indolence of the Dutch commanders and troops, naive blue on their downcast gaze, and, very relevant,with the laziness of superiors on the phone, who were not there to check what was looming, but who did not even attend to what was in no way unimaginable.

The survival instinct, the impressive images of the crowds gathered by the closed gate of the UN camp, the strength of the camera and the spectacular work with the masses of interpreters, hundreds of faces perfectly chosen and guided not to look like extras from a film, but human beings a step away from the slaughterhouse, round off a formidable work, recent candidate for the Oscar for best international film.

Although there is still more: a wonderful double epilogue;

one on the material consequences at home, and another, years later, in a city school, halfway between reconciliation and impossible oblivion.

And here, the nuances will have to be put by the viewer.

QUO VADIS, AIDA?

Direction: Jasmila Žbanić.

Performers: Jasna Đuričić, Boris Isakovic, Johan Heldenbergh, Raymond Thiry.

Genre: drama. Bosnia, 2020.

Duration: 104 minutes.