This year, on the thirtieth anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica, the BH Film program presents three documentary films that explore the consequences this gravest of crimes has left on society and individuals, as well as on the very core of social life – families.
The first film, which our audience will be able to see today at 6 PM – and with which we will open our program – bears the very title FAMILY. Directed by Davorin Sekulić and written by Tatjana Sekulić, FAMILY tells the story of people who, even in the hardest of times, tried to preserve hope, who did not hesitate to raise their voices against the crimes, and who, after everything, are struggling to live normal lives again in a town that for the rest of the country and the world has become synonymous with a mass grave. After a few striking transitions between present-day shots of Srebrenica and family home videos from the late 1980s—on one side deserted shops, ruined buildings, and burned-out houses, on the other cheerful people dancing, toasting, and joking in the very same places—we meet the members of this, at first glance, completely ordinary family: a mother, father, grandmother, aunt, and three children. Those children, born in the happy prewar 1980s, are now adults who make their living in other parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina or abroad. Their parents continue life in Srebrenica, in their stable “mixed” marriage, refusing to fully face the grim reality: Srebrenica is no longer the prosperous industrial town where a mining engineer like Nermina Sekulić could build a career, nor is it a place where investigative journalism such as that of Marinko Sekulić can find a real audience. The old residents were killed or displaced, while the new ones are uninterested in values they might share with their neighbors. Friends are gone. Relatives are far away. Their children have moved on with their lives. The two parents remain alone in their futile, stubborn, yet heroic struggle to bring back normal life to a place everyone wishes to forget—except those whose loved ones are buried there.
The documentary NO ONE WILL HURT YOU will be screened tomorrow, August 17, at the same time. The film’s director, Dino Hodić, is originally from Zvornik, once also a thriving, promising town right on the border with Serbia. Dino begins his investigation with his own family—who, purely by chance and because his father had already been working in Switzerland before the war, managed to escape the massacre at the last moment. Similar to the Sekulić parents in FAMILY, Dino’s grandparents return to Zvornik despite everything, wishing to spend their old age on their own doorstep, in their own home. This film also uses family photos and recordings from happy prewar days in stark contrast with the bleak everyday reality of today’s Zvornik. It also includes remarkable, rarely seen wartime archival footage—both from massacre sites such as Srebrenica and Zvornik, and from Serbian TV appearances of war instigators. However, Dino Hodić, now a fully-fledged Swiss citizen of Bosnian origin, decides to investigate further—he travels to Srebrenica to meet Hasan Hasanović, the man who carried his dead brother’s body for more than twenty kilometers so he could give him a dignified burial. Hasan Hasanović is one of the few who survived the Death March—the hundred-kilometer trek from fallen Srebrenica to free territory near Tuzla. His story is a harrowing testimony of the Chetniks’ cruelty, who set deadly traps in the forests for the few who tried to escape; of a loss that took away two younger brothers in two days; of blood, evil, hunger, and exhaustion; but also of the superhuman effort to survive—because somewhere out there, on free ground, his mother, wife, and one-year-old son might still be waiting for him. Here, death and life constantly wrestle for dominance; loss is incurable, but it must not be surrendered to, for the sake of the future of the new life that still needs to be raised in hope.
On August 18, again at 6 PM, our audience will have the chance to watch THE SREBRENICA TAPE – FROM DAD TO ALISA. Alisa is a thirty-eight-year-old American of Bosnian-Serbian origin. Every summer she spends time in Ljubovija, Serbia, with her maternal grandmother. Ljubovija, like Zvornik, lies right on the border. Across the Drina, Bosnia is visible, and in the 1990s little Alisa could watch the war unfolding on the other side of the river from her grandmother’s window—a war that trapped her parents in Srebrenica. Alisa is also a child of “mixed” parents. Her mother Dana, a Serb from Ljubovija, fell in love with Sejfo, a handsome Muslim from Srebrenica, and decided to settle there. In those happy 1980s, this was nothing unusual. Dana survived, fleeing Srebrenica along the Death March, hoping all the while to meet Sejfo in the forests. She never did. Sejfo was killed. The only tangible testimony of his life in wartime Srebrenica—and of him as a father—was a videotape he recorded during the siege, which, thanks to surviving friends, reached Alisa. This time, Alisa is not going on vacation. She travels to Srebrenica, following in her father’s footsteps through his recordings, piecing together the mosaic of memories of Sejfo from those who knew him: friends he laughed and swam in the Drina with, those with whom he ran a wartime cinema, and those who remember his efforts to preserve some semblance of life in a place about to become a town of death. Similar to MY FATHER’S DIARIES by Ada Hasanović, screened in last year’s BH Film program, the videotape immortalizes a flesh-and-blood man—with all his flaws, unspoken defeats, unbreakable hope, and, above all, with his indescribable paternal love.
All three films are voices of the same generation born in the 1980s. Now adults who mostly no longer live in Srebrenica or Zvornik but are scattered across Bosnia and Herzegovina and beyond, they search through old family photos and videos to find answers to what life once looked like. That past no longer exists. Their loved ones from those recordings are gone. Those who remain still try to return to it—to that time that is no more. Now there is death, desolation, poverty, and division. So how do we move forward? Perhaps the answer lies precisely in those recordings, and in that stubborn struggle. Perhaps a better tomorrow can only be born from examples of the past—lessons of the good, and testimonies of the very worst. So that it may never happen again.
Bojana Vidosavljević
