“Quō vādis?” Acts of Peter, Codex Vercellensis Evangeliorum
The title of director and screenwriter Jasmila Žbanić‘s powerful, shattering, and extraordinary Oscar-nominated Quo vadis, Aida? (2020) references the apocryphal tale of Peter encountering Christ on the Appian way, asking his Lord where he was going, to which Christ replies — to Rome, to be crucified again.
The film follows the story of schoolteacher Aida (a majestic Jasna Đuričić, in this case, notably, a Serbian actress), working as a UN translator in Srebrenica, in 1995, at the very end of the civil war in Bosnia (and ex-Yugoslavia), desperately attempting to save her family from impending slaughter whilst the UN Safe Zone that was Srebrenica (protecting the Bosniak Muslim population after the retreat of the Bosniak Army) came under brutal attack by Bosnian Serb forces, under the command of the infamous general Ratko Mladić. Faced with an astonishing level of neglect by the international community, and confounded by the bureaucratic rigidity (coupled with a military inefficiency) of the UN Dutch peacekeepers employed in protecting the Safe Zone of Srebrenica, she navigates the terrifying events with incredible force of intent, attempting to shelter her two sons from certain death — Hamdija, a gentle musician of Uni age (Boris Ler) and Sejo, a charismatic teen, aged 17 (Dino Bajrović), his 18th birthday only days away. Only to realise, in the end, that she was woefully wrong in her own assessment of the situation.
Before I delve more deeply into analysis, I must mention that it took me some time to publish this review (three years, precisely) — as it became too personal, rendering me incapable of releasing it, to the point of paralysis. On this I subsequently wrote in an academic paper on self-censorship and trauma.
Equally, I felt that my intimate investment seemed unbecoming to the collective grief that this film so quietly, formidably, devastatingly depicts.
But, I realised that this was a personal film for Žbanić, in its own making. There are films like that, cut from the same cloth as the filmmaker, created to slice straight to the bone. So, I decided to keep with the personal.
Firstly, in form of a historical note — one from behind (quite literally) enemy lines, as I would have never been able to watch Quo vadis, Aida? without allowing it to be an internal journey into the past of my own country, ex-Yugoslavia, and the civil war that tore it apart.
In July 1995, when the massacre in Srebrenica happened, I was still in Serbia. The murder of more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys by units of the Bosnian Serb Army of Republika Srpska, under the command of Ratko Mladić, and in the presence of the unprepared UN Dutch peacekeepers, had been reported mostly through independent media in Serbia — although the full terrifying scope of it only became clear in the region as time passed. Yet, anyone exclusively watching the Serbian state media in the months (and years) following July 1995, would have been fed a narrative quite different to the horrific events which unfolded — with endless distortions ranging from the numbers of casualties being overblown, to the macabre tales of dead bodies shipped from across Bosnia to create statistics.
The essence of the genocide denial was that all sides in the war in Bosnia committed atrocities (Serbs, Croats, Bosniak Muslims), but only Serbs were indicted and internationally vilified due to geopolitical reasons. Unfortunately, as with all successful propaganda, there is truth in this statement, but the difference in the number of casualties is crucial. The insistence on this parallel served the nationalist apparatus in Serbia extremely well, for decades, in internally covering up war crimes.
Despite the evidence now being clear and unassailable, an element of strong denial is still steadily present in parts of the Serbian population (both in Bosnia and in Serbia), almost thirty years later, although the Serbian state, itself, honours the victims, officially, each July. Many people in Serbia do so too, while backlash and intimidation, verbal, and otherwise, is commonplace. As is the feeling of one’s victimhood being unacknowledged, particularly regarding the unhealed echoes of WWII.
Quo vadis, Aida? was, inevitably, a profoundly traumatic watch, yet an artistically hypnotising one. I viewed it, almost on a loop, three times.
On first viewing, it was a turbulent experience, crushing and immediate. These were people I knew — the way they expressed themselves, the culture, all the nuances of the language they spoke. The elder son of Aida, Hamdija, with his music, his escapism, and his psychological detachment, I identified with immediately — he had been most likely the same age as me, at the time, only a few hundred symbolical miles apart.
The haunting dreamlike sequence of a small-town Miss Eastern Bosnia celebration, mid-film, a local party just before the war broke, and the tensions on the faces of people soon to be slaughtered by those closest to them, sitting in the same frame, is beautiful in the most wretched of ways. The performed tune, by Hamdija’s band, with the lyrics of a love song warning of ‘living in the clouds’ by Zdravko Čolic, a Sarajevo-born Balkan pop star, who moved to Belgrade when war broke, exposes the mixture of sorrow and wrath of the filmmaker, and the doomed state of the people she depicts, with the finest of cinematic subtleties. This darkly fluid imagery internally ringing more true to life than the starkness of the real horror that followed.
The second time I saw Quo vadis, Aida? was right after the first viewing, on repeat. I then had space within my experience to observe its flow, every human detail and word in the storyline perfectly placed in a mosaic — slowly, excruciatingly, building into a tragedy of ancient proportions. Firstly, in Aida’s heartbreaking hubris in insisting on knowing what is best for her two sons, disregarding her elder’s intuitive response of fleeing; sheltering the young men only for them both to be taken away and killed, along with her husband Nihad (soulfully played by Izudin Bajrović) — who instead of accepting the possibility of saving himself, followed his sons into machine-gun fire. Secondly, in Nihad’s stern patriarchal stance in believing general Mladić on his word, after being hurdled to negotiate with him, while petrified, over the very astute instinctual response of his female colleague, Ćamila, portrayed wonderfully by Jelena Kordić Kuret, who was certain of the scenario to follow, despite all the general’s claims to the contrary. And thirdly, in the demeanour of the young, almost teenage Dutch UN peacekeeping battalion, in turns eerily detached and truly terrified, when faced with the fierce battle-ready arrogance of the Bosnian Serb Army.
The UN commanders’ strange apathy and a lack of understanding of the situation they found themselves in is equally astonishing — Colonel Karremans (an excellent Johan Heldenbergh) almost smugly referring to himself as “only the piano player” in a conversation with people clearly terrified of imminent extinction. Major Franken, astutely summarised by Raymond Thiry, faced with actual mass murder on his watch, repeating corporate mantras, like “stick to the rules” and “get on with work” to the point of ludicrousness.
Every single performance in the film is precise, devastating, and unforgettable.
Third time I viewed Aida, after a brief pause, I focused only on male violence on display. As the proximity of what had been depicted resonated deeply — a long overdue pent up feminine rage exploded, wide open. I don’t think I have ever been as deeply affected by anger while watching any work of film fiction, no matter the truth of a subject. Each image on screen so clearly a pandemonium of a primordial cult of extreme virility, unleashed and unrepentant in its increasing monstrosity.
From its introductory scene, a cannon of a military vehicle, erect, steamrolling across a field, the soldiers’ victorious swagger in demolishing a city, to the absolute lustful disdain for womanhood, the violent sexual undertones, hidden in plain sight, in the film’s very fibre, and finally, to Ratko Mladić’s insistence on repeating the word ‘Serbian’ ad nauseum in his customised media coverage (subsequently asking the cameraman if he perhaps had “overdone it”), appropriating the destiny of an entire nation of people (including my own) to satisfy a very personal pathological mythomania.
Boris Isaković plays the supreme confidence, casual charm, and palpable malevolence of Mladić so incredibly well, that those of us who are aware of the mannerisms of the man through years of seeing him on television, in war reports, must have been all truly spooked (as I was).
In the actual documentary footage mirrored in Aida, you can hear Mladić repeatedly using the word ‘Turks’ when referring to Bosniak Muslims, evoking ancient battles and vengeance for the crimes of the Ottoman Empire, almost two hundred years after the dreaded occupiers had left.
This terrified me, when I watched those clips at the time, and on a cellular level. It held a unmistakable pattern of repeating cycles, destroying hopes of any future clear of this insanity.
The cult of hyper-masculinity found its use in the core of every fascism. The twist in the tragic destiny of a generation born in WW2, across ex-Yugoslavia, was that their fathers died fighting fascism (as Mladić’s father did), while some of their sons took to perversely resurrecting it albeit in a homegrown, hybrid form, conjuring an orgy of fury and blood-soaked mindless righteousness.
The penultimate sequence of the film, years after the massacre, when Aida, with other mothers of Srebrenica identifies the bones of her family is breathtaking in its cosmic injustice — and infinite tragedy.
If I have any minor fault to press on Žbanić’s script, it is the lack of characterisation I felt had tainted the depiction of the soldiers of the Bosnian Serb Army — except at the very end, when they became civilians again, and upon Aida’s Christ-like return to Srebrenica. Nevertheless, these elements, which I view as subtly political, pale in significance when compared to the gravitas this film has, in its entirety, and the courage and rigour with which it tackles its themes.
Whoever lived in the chauvinist squalor that was the 1990s in the Balkans, a time when avenging ghosts and delusional violent men ravaged these lands, knows the truth when they see it.
There may be many paths to it, as there are to the allegorical Rome in the title.
But there is only one destination.
★★★★★
Author: © Milana Vujkov
Lola On Film 