From today’s BH Film programme, we are highlighting INN A STATE OF SIEGE, a film by Somali-Dutch director Qali Nur. The film had its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, while the Bosnian-Herzegovinian premiere, as part of our programme, in one of the screening rooms of the Cineplexx multiplex, is the only logical continuation, given that Cineplexx is located in the same complex in Marindvor as the hotel now known as Holiday Sarajevo — the hotel that is the main character of this documentary.
Holiday Inn was once called Holiday Inn (it was part of the eponymous global hotel chain), and under that name it experienced both its brightest and its darkest days. Built in 1983 for the 14th Winter Olympic Games, during that famous Sarajevo year of 1984 it became a temporary home to numerous international officials, royal families and world stars, as well as Juan Antonio Samaranch, then president of the International Olympic Committee, who officially opened the hotel. Some eight years later, Holiday Inn became the unofficial headquarters of Karadžić’s SDS far-right nationalist party. The first shots fired at Sarajevo civilians who were peacefully protesting in front of the hotel and the parliament building on 5 April 1992 came from the hotel, and with the beginning of the siege, all the way until the end of the war in 1995, it became a base for war correspondents and reporters from all over the world who spent four years reporting directly on Sarajevo’s daily tragedy.
In its relatively short lifetime, having barely entered its fifth decade of existence, this building has seen it all: it witnessed misery, prestige and celebration, but also crime, bloodshed and suffering. Designed as a luxurious hotel for its time, right in the city’s business centre, it became not only its symbol, but also its centre, a vortex from which history poured over it. Holiday Inn was written about not only by great foreign writers such as Kenneth Morrison, but also by local writers and journalists such as Miljenko Jergović, who spent the first year of the siege in Sarajevo; Zlatko Dizdarević, who directly witnessed the events surrounding the yellow building in his wartime diaries; and Karim Zaimović, perhaps the greatest Bosnian-Herzegovinian writer to die prematurely, killed by an enemy shrapnel fragment in the final months of the siege. The yellow building with brown details, which Sarajevans often joke is, alongside the Great Wall of China, the only visible man-made object from the Moon, experienced far more in the first two decades of its existence than its architect, Ivan Štraus, could have imagined even in his wildest and darkest dreams.
How does one approach such a well-known and contradictory symbol as the building of today’s Holiday Sarajevo hotel, especially as someone coming from the outside? What is there left to say that is not already known? Director Qali Nur finds an approach similar to that of Danis Tanović, who made the feature film DEATH IN SARAJEVO in and, in a way, about this very building, placing major historical figures and events in and around the hotel into the perspective of the workers who work there. Yet Qali Nur, unlike our Oscar winner, makes a documentary and therefore chooses as her protagonists precisely those who form the soul of this building and who survived everything there and alongside it: the hotel workers who started working there in the happy eighties and thanks to whom the hotel survived the bloody nineties. They are Mustafa, the cook; Faruk, the waiter; and Ismet, the driver.
Some of them started working at the hotel as teenagers, while others came to it as young and promising professionals in their respective fields. All of them, in their own way, gave the hotel their all. They protected it, rebuilt it, served its guests and kept it supplied, putting their lives at risk every day throughout the 1,425 days of the siege of Sarajevo. Luckily, they survived. And now, together with the hotel, they bear witness to everything impossible and unbelievable they saw. All three now have sons, born before, during or shortly after the war, to whom they recount their experiences in the film. They pass on the message that in wars, it is always the working class that suffers. And they offer prayers for a little peace and joy after all the suffering, both in this city and throughout the dunjaluk. Whether anyone will have open ears and hearts to listen to them remains an open question.
Bojana Vidosavljević
