There are many haunting scenes in
Quo Vadis, Aida?, the awards contender directed by Jasmila Zbanic. But one lingers more than any other, despite being seemingly unobtrusive: a burning cake, left in an oven, as the Army of Republika Srpska takes over the Bosnian city of Srebrenica in the summer of 1995, part of the conflict that ripped apart south-east Europe during the 1990s.
It’s a fleeting and simple shot that elegiacally alludes to the horrors to come: the disruption of normalcy; the premature termination of young lives; and the foreboding silence of the world.
In one unassuming image, Zbanic has given us a pictogram of the lives that were, and the lives that could’ve been; of the estimated 8,000-plus Bosniak Muslim men and boys massacred during the most heinous and most notorious event of the Bosnian War.
High on the list of achievements of the Bosnian drama
Quo Vadis, Aida? must be its success in dramatising the hours leading up to the Srebrenica genocide – where more than 8,000 men and boys were killed in July 1995 – without showing anything more violent than a slap in the face. As this besieged mountain town, a supposed UN safe zone, is overrun by Bosnian Serb forces led by Ratko Mladic (Boris Isakovic), soldiers are seen looting houses and opening fire. A “formal ultimatum” issued by the UN, which threatened air strikes if the Serbs advanced, was about as realistic a deterrent as the toy helicopter we glimpse on the steps of a ransacked home.