Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020)
Quo Vadis, Aida? has a hair-raising way of stopping the flow of events and then resuming. In between scenes as terrifying as a horror movie, writer-director Jasmila Zbanic pauses to capture the infinitesimal moments that represent life, beauty and normalcy – a look exchanged between a young man and a woman, shared cigarettes, a couple making out, clothes being washed.
The setting makes these fleeting moments of grace all the more precious. The movie explores the Srebrenica massacre that took place during the Bosnian War in 1995. Serbian forces overran the town, supposedly a safe zone under the protection of the United Nations, and slaughtered thousands of men and boys. In the movie, a few thousand of the Srebrenica’s Bosnian Muslims manage to find shelter in a UN base, while a vastly bigger crowd waits outside, hoping against hope.
In "Quo Vadis, Aida?," Jasmila Zbanic s swift and shattering movie about the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, a woman climbs onto a small structure and stares out over a barbed-wire fence into
A still from ‘Quo Vadis, Aida?’ | Photo Credit:
IFFR Press
How two starkly different films on war made by two remarkably powerful voices are united in their common fight to make a larger political commentary about our times
You can’t break me
At the risk of sounding a little insensitive, Marta Popivoda’s
Landscapes of Resistance is the most engaging film I caught at the Rotterdam Film Festival. It is engaging because of the visual style that Marta opts; the film is abstract and thematically, it reminded me of the great Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s
24 Frames. Like the latter, Marta’s documentary feature (she calls it a “Partisan” film) has the visuals talking, although we do have a voiceover and a protagonist. As the title indicates, the film is about resistance and the unbroken spirit exhibited by Sonja, who was among the first female partisans in Serbia who helped lead the resistance in Auschwitz (doesn’t the name itself send shudders?). At one