Sarajevo on film 2020 Bosnia and Herzegovina
Quo Vadis, Aida?
Jasmila Žbanić's Oscar-nominated film about Srebrenica — made by a Sarajevo director who lived through the siege, and the country's most important film in a generation.
- Director
- Jasmila Žbanić
- Year
- 2020
- Runtime
- 104 minutes
- Language
- Bosnian
- Country
- Bosnia and Herzegovina
- Genre
- war, drama
Quo Vadis, Aida? is not set in Sarajevo, and its inclusion here is deliberate: it is the most important film to come out of the Bosnian war, made by a director who lived through the siege of Sarajevo, and it completes the story that the Sarajevo films tell. It follows Aida, a schoolteacher turned translator inside the UN compound at Srebrenica in July 1995, as she watches the Dutch peacekeepers negotiate with the army of Republika Srpska and understands, with mounting horror, that the men she is translating for are negotiating the fate of her family and her town.
Jasmila Žbanić — the Sarajevo director of Grbavica — made the film as her fourth feature, and it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in 2021. It is a film built on a single, unbearable dramatic irony: the translator is the one person who understands exactly what is being said, and the more she understands, the less she can do about it. The film is a record of the genocide, the failure of the UN’s protection, and the particular Bosnian experience of being translated, administered, and failed by an international system.
For a visitor to Sarajevo, it is the film to watch after the War Childhood Museum and the siege memorials — the place where the country’s twentieth century ends. Sarajevo survived its siege; Srebrenica is what the same war did three years later, and this is the film that refuses to let it be the footnote.
Critical reception
Quo Vadis, Aida? was nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in 2021 and swept the European Film Awards, winning best film, best director, and best actress. It holds a 100% Tomatometer and a Metacritic score of 97 — the most acclaimed film ever made about the Bosnian war.
Public reception and legacy
Quo Vadis, Aida? was the most-watched film in Bosnia for three consecutive weeks despite the pandemic, and Metacritic ranked it the best film of 2021. Its Bosnian premiere took place at the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial in October 2020, and it is based on the survivor-translator Hasan Nuhanović’s book Under the UN Flag. Reception in the region split along the war’s fault lines — the actor who played Mladić faced pressure in Serbia, and denialist reviews appeared — which is itself a measure of the film’s power.
What the critics said
“each of those 8,372 deaths is an individual, exponential multiplication of horror.”Read the review →
Portrait: Elena Ternovaja · CC BY-SA 3.0
“a razor-sharp incrimination of failed foreign policies from around the world embedded in a deeply humanist and moving character study”