Sarajevo on film 1994 United States / Canada
Romeo and Juliet in Sarajevo
The couple killed by a sniper on the Vrbanja Bridge while fleeing the siege — their photograph became the war's most human image.
- Director
- John Zaritsky
- Year
- 1994
- Language
- English
- Country
- United States / Canada
- Genre
- documentary
Romeo and Juliet in Sarajevo is the documentary of the single most human image of the siege. Admira Ismić and Boško Brkić were Sarajevo natives — she was a Bosniak, he was a Bosnian Serb — who had grown up together in the city and decided, in May 1993, to leave it. They were shot dead by a sniper on the Vrbanja Bridge as they tried to cross to the Serb-held side, one bullet each, their bodies falling a metre apart. Mark H. Milstein’s photograph of them lying together was published around the world; Kurt Schork filed the Reuters dispatch that named them.
John Zaritsky’s 1994 film, made for PBS’s Frontline, tells their story through the families they left behind — two families on opposite sides of the war, agreeing on almost nothing except that the two young people who loved each other should not have died. The bridge where they fell spans the Miljacka, the same river you walk beside today; it is now marked, and the crossing they attempted is a short, ordinary walk.
For a visitor, it is the film that reduces the siege to its smallest, most unbearable unit: two people on a bridge. Nothing else in the city’s cinema makes the war so personal, and nothing else explains so directly why the war was fought in neighbourhoods and across rivers you can still cross in a minute.
Critical reception
The Frontline documentary won an Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award and an Emmy nomination. Its most lasting critical assessment came from the Journal for MultiMedia History, which read the film’s power as the personalisation of a conflict too often counted in larger units.
Public reception and legacy
The film’s power rests on the events it records: Kurt Schork’s Reuters dispatch and Mark Milstein’s photograph were published around the world, and the couple’s story became a symbol of the war’s absurdity. After the war, at the initiative of Admira’s father, the couple were exhumed and reburied together in Sarajevo’s Lion Cemetery; Kurt Schork’s ashes were later interred at the same grave. The film won a duPont–Columbia Award and an Emmy nomination, and a Scottish education authority later used its script to teach children the consequences of ethnic hatred.
What the critics said
“the strength of the piece lies in the interviews and images that give a context to multiethnic disintegration and a city under attack.”Read the review →