Actor Boris Isakovic, director Jasmila Zbanic, actors Jasna Duricic and Raymond Thiry pose for photographers at the photo call for the film Quo Vadis, Aida ? during the 77th edition of the Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy on September 3, 2020. [File: Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP]
Quo Vadis, Aida?, Jasmila Žbanić’s gut-wrenching film about the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica, the end-game of the Bosnian war, is this year’s Bosnian entry for the foreign feature category of the Academy Awards. Directed by Žbanić and produced by her small independent company Deblokada, the film is set to compete against the film industry’s favourite – Another Round, a Danish comedy-drama about male bonding, mid-life crisis, and binge-drinking. The contrast between the worlds that the two films inhabit and represent could not be greater.
Why Quo Vadis, Aida? deserves an Oscar
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Why Quo Vadis, Aida? deserves an Oscar
msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
What were you doing in the summer of 1995? The UK was buoyant, just two years away from New Labour’s landslide victory, casting off the yoke of a generation of Tory rule. Tony Blair was leader of the Labour opposition, young and vibrant, still blissfully unaware of 9/11, Afghanistan, the subsequent War on Terror and free from the hubris of the invasion of Iraq. Cool Britannia gave the UK a new global swagger and the dazzling spectacle of Euro 96 was just a year away. Generation X were about to inherit the earth.
In the same summer in Srebrenica, units of the Bosnian Serb Army under the command of Ratko Mladić and elements of the paramilitary unit, The Scorpions prepared to partake in the genocide of over 8000 Bosnian Muslims, unarmed men and boys separated from their loved ones, shot and disposed of in mass graves.