Frightened, filthy men and women are separated by gender and pushed onto buses, taunted, harassed, assaulted, herded off to certain death. This is not Nazi Germany in 1942.
1000 miles from where I was growing up, in the middle of Europe (the distance between Toronto and Winnipeg), 8,372 men were killed as I was finishing university and getting ready to move to Canada, exactly 50 years after WWII and the Holocaust. Many films have been made about the 1995 Screbrenica massacre, and it is not often that you find a truly impactful dramatization outside of Anglo-American fictionalisations (often centred around Western protagonists like war reporters or humanitarians) or documentaries. Quo Vadis, Aida? is one such drama, entirely female-helmed and set in a male world. Bosnian director and screenwriter Jasmila Žbanić (Berlinale Golden Bear winner 2006), Austrian cinematographer Christine A. Maier and Serbian lead actress Jasna Djuricic accomplish a remarkable feat.
The film is a co-production between Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austria, Romania, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, France, Norway, and Turkey.
Aida, a former teacher, is now the translator between the Srebrenica administration, the Dutch United Nations command and the Serbian militia under Ratko Mladić. The entire film hinges on her: translator, confidante, negotiator, strategist. As she has to translate whatever is being said, she becomes the aim of people's frustration and anger. "Grandma, I’m just an interpreter," she says as an old woman pleads for access to a bathroom, but she soon realizes she isn’t. She is increasingly getting involved, dissenting, trying to exert influence, persuade, plead, maneuvre. Under pressure every minute of the day, she is driven and hunted, most of the time running because a minute can make the difference between life and death, helping birth babies while dealing with her personal worries and trying to avert her family’s sealed fate.
As thousands are paraded off to their executions, Žbanić throws us into that moment of fear, doubt, and hope with the besieged Bosnian Muslims (she doesn't delve into sectarian back stories and that's a good thing here). Although we already know the historical outcome, she makes us
feel a semblance of these decisive moments and (in)actions.
No group gets entirely vilified, not the Serbian death squads (one of them is a former student of Aida's, another a friend's schoolmate), not the barely of age Dutch child soldiers, whose war this so clearly isn't, with no personal or cultural stake in their deployment. A Serbian militia demonstratively grabs a blue helmet off a UN soldier's head in a macabre little dance, to no consequence, like everything else. The death squads have long realized, infringement upon infringement, that they are not facing military or political opposition or punishment.
How did we get here, just a generation ago? How did a UN "safe zone" turn into a killing field while a few miles north the Schengen agreement of free movement across the EU was signed? You pick up the fatal mix of reasons and mistakes as events and decisions propel the story along like a tank, heavy, ominous, with a deafening crescendo. Ignorance. Inexperience. Helplessness. Indifference. Cowardice. Broken down chains of command. Incompetent international coordination. Following orders. Naively going along with the propaganda. Political strategizing, scheming, appeasing. Kowtowing to a maneater. Empty ultimatums. Fatal individual decisions. Difficult moral decisions to (hopefully) secure safe passage for a few without endangering the entire camp and staff. You can read the increasing frustration, desperation, and foresight on Aida's face as she tries to stop disaster and extinction from hurtling towards her neighbours in front of her eyes.
Director Žbanić stays so close to Aida, and Djuricic delivers so forcefully in the lead role that it seems, to the viewer as well as likely to her, that the Balkans' fate rest on the shoulders of this one woman, as neither generals nor the nations of the world seem to be able or willing to stop the worst post-World War II atrocity in Europe.
Quo Vadis, Aida? is one of the most frustrating films I have seen, exactly
because this seemingly formally conventional narrative drama gets across the uncertainty, the threat, the fear, the panic, the apparent inevitability, the stench of the camp so palpably and in real time, Žbanić puts us nearly in Aida's shoes. The symbolism in the final scene of children performing a "now you see (me), now you don't" skit is devastating. Quo Vadis, Aida? (which probably would have benefitted internationally from a less ornate title) deserved each of the three awards it won at Venice.
by
@JuttaBrendemuhl
image: still Quo Vadis, Aida? courtesy Coop99 Filmproduktion
