“Why Criticism” is a film criticism-themed Vague Visages column featuring various contributors.

What does it mean to make a “good” film about a genocide? The mass communicative nature of cinema (and TV) provides a way for people to engage with history en masse in a way that isn’t really possible with literature. Cinema has a unique power to influence and shape how people see historical events. And when it comes to depicting genocide, the capacity to shape narratives comes with an added layer of gravity, particularly in regard to genocides still denied by their perpetrators.

The camera’s gaze is at the core of this debate. How do you depict the collective dehumanisation and murder of human beings without in some way exploiting that dehumanisation for dramatic purposes yourself? How do you produce cinema that is true to events without reproducing the same distanced, detached gaze that so often precipitates them whilst the worst unfolds?

The Oscar nomination of Quo Vadis, Aida? for the Best International Feature Film is some form of vindication for telling these stories with fidelity to the events without losing sight of the humanity of the victims. The film, directed by Jasmila Žbanić, depicts the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, where Serbian forces led by Ratko Mladić surrounded the Bosnian Muslim-majority townspeople, who were theoretically under the protection of the UN. They weren’t, and some 8,000 Bosnians were murdered. 

The gravity of the incident is still downplayed by those in power in Serbia and Republika Srpska, the Serbian-majority section of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The current President of Serbia once said during the Bosnian War that “for every Serb killed we will kill 100 Muslims,” whilst Milorad Dodik, the President of Republika Srpska, has claimed Srebrenica is a fabricated myth.

Quo Vadis, Aida? is a clear-eyed retelling of the events from the perspective of Aida (Jasna Djuričić), a translator working for the UN. Because of her job, she’s just close enough to the action to see the back-door power dealings for what they are, but not powerful enough to do anything meaningful about it.

Žbanić never relents from the focus on Aida and her dawning predicament as to what is about to happen. The being of Aida as a protagonist is central. She is a victim and a survivor of Srebrenica, yes, but her existence within the film goes beyond these characterisations. She never loses her humanity — the sense of her deep connection to the people around whom she calls family, friends and neighbours — and neither do any of the other characters in Quo Vadis, Aida?, even the perpetrators. 

Žbanić takes care to show the perpetrators not as monstrous villains, but as neighbours, fathers and former friends. Audiences are never allowed to lose sight of the monstrosity of their acts — but part of the horror lies in the fact that these were people who lived alongside Bosnian Muslims, drank in the same bars, went to the same schools and even slept in the same beds. After the war, these existences continued: many of the perpetrators walk freely amongst the cities and towns of the former Yugoslavia. Similarly, Žbanić also understands that the inactivity of the UN during the massacre was not due to some Machiavellian conspiratorial plan to let these murders happen, but a Western-centric laziness and lack of understanding, married to the sluggishness endemic to major institutions. Quo Vadis, Aida? doesn’t let them off the hook — the UN is almost as much as fault for Srebrenica as Ratko Mladić — but it gives their inactivity a context. Srebrenica did not happen because of some great malicious evil. It happened because of concrete political factors, many of which could have been stopped.

This is, I think, what separates Quo Vadis, Aida?  from most films when it comes to depicting genocide. There is a deep understanding of who has committed what crimes throughout, and the film’s specificity extends to its victims, for whom viewers are allowed to see precisely what they lost. It’s difficult for people to conceive scales of tragedy, but we can more readily comprehend losing a partner or a friend than we can an entire village. The people of Quo Vadis, Aida? are not automatons designed exclusively to suffer, but there’s a sense of their past and present.

Bosnian cinema has, since the country’s emergence from the Yugoslav War, been dominated by the breakup of Yugoslavia and the subsequent war, which is no surprise given the scale of devastation there, particularly compared to Serbia and Croatia. The first film produced in an independent Bosnia, Perfect Circle (1997), uses location shooting in a still-ruined Sarajevo to tell a story of survival during the city’s three-year siege. In the new millennium, a crop of excellent directors — many of whom had lived through the siege of Sarajevo together and were encouraged partly by European funding — found success on the European festival circuit. 

No Man’s Land (2001) won the Best Foreign Film Oscar that year (beating out Amélie) and tells a bleakly humorous story about three men stuck in a trench, one lying on an active landmine and unable to move. Pjer Žalica’s Fuse (2003) and Days and Hours (2004) took on post-war political dysfunction and family grief respectively. Snow (2008) looks at how the war affected rural Bosnian villages and the ensuing trauma that resulted from it. Žbanić’s debut, Grbavica (2006), won the Golden Bear in Berlin and deals head-on with the issue of systemic rape by Serbian forces of Bosnian women during the war.

These films are all varying degrees of excellent, dealing frankly with the difficult issues of the war and its lingering pain. But would these films (and Quo Vadis, Aida?) have been possible without European funding? All have some degree of production help from abroad. Given that Bosnian cinema has little funding nationally, it’s perhaps understandable that they all reached out further afield to collect the resources required to make a film. But it begs the question — for whom are these films being made?

For the most part, these films aren’t exactly box office hits back home. Given that the war is living memory for pretty much anyone over the age of 30, this is perfectly understandable. With the numerous political machinations in Bosnia’s complex state system, it’s almost impossible to get anything actually done when it comes to building a functioning Bosnian state.

The fate for many of these films is the same: they receive European funding. They premiere at festivals to acclaim and chin-scratching from critics about the “importance of cinema.”They may even get brief theatrical runs in some territories. Then, they practically disappear (most of the aforementioned films are, to my knowledge, not available on streaming and are mostly out-of-print on DVD).

This leads to the interesting conundrum where many of these films, despite their best intentions, fail to make any impact at all back home. That may be changing with Quo Vadis, Aida?, which premiered at the Srebrenica Memorial Centre, gathering young people not just from Bosnia, but Croatia and Serbia too. The current generation of ex-Yugoslav youths have grown up with little memory of the war. They are in its shadow but ready to move beyond it — given the right tools.

I don’t expect cinema to change anything, but neither do I doubt that Žbanić, Žalica, Kenović, Begić, Tanović and more did not make their films so that European audiences would tut at what a horrible deal this all is. Likely, they all hoped their films would make some difference to the post-war healing process.

It’s in the context of who a film is for that I warily cast my glance at La Llorona, Jayro Bustamente’s 2019 Guatemalan film. Based on the genocide of Guatemalan indigenous peoples in the country’s civil war, where the state’s white military elite massacred a minimum of 32,000 individuals, the story is framed through a military family’s state trial in the modern era, the patriarch charged with these murders. Alongside the trail plotline and crowd protests, there’s an indigenous maid who may or may not be a ghostly apparition.

La Llorona has a cautious, carefully-crafted and ethereal approach. But is it effective? The combination of the genre elements and the incorporation of the Latin American folktale of the weeping woman, who cries for her drowned children, feels like a tool designed to hook Western audiences. La Llorona belongs to that freshly-minted genre known as “elevated horror,” or as I like to call it, “horror films embarrassed to admit that they’re horror films.”

But throughout, La Llorona is hands-off about its subject matter (at least until the closing moments). Things are implied but never truly declared. By dancing around the subject, as if to give it subtext that may make it “readable” to an international audience, it loses sight of its message and the audience.

It’s a shame because the horror genre is absolutely appropriate for dealing with such grim subject matter. Few genres are so predicated on cinema’s purest visceral capabilities. To back away from horror’s potential — and to dress up the narrative with icy, arthouse framing — feels like a betrayal to the story.

But given that I was born less than 200km from the events of Quo Vadis, Aida? and about 10,000 km from the events of La Llorona, is it a surprise that I am intrinsically more “moved” by the former than the latter? I can see the shadows cast every day by the wars of the 90s in contemporary ex-Yugoslavia, but I’ve never set foot in Guatemala. My own personal background is intimately tied up in how I respond to these films.

Roger Ebert once wrote “it’s not what a film is about, it’s how it is about it,” and it’s this phrase that I usually return to when thinking about cinema that deals with humanity’s worst impulses. Film can only give us a glimpse into the sheer chaos and brutality we as human beings are capable of. The vast majority of us cannot comprehend what it is like to be stood in Srebrenica on that hot July day in 1995. We cannot comprehend what it is to survive the execution squads in the highlands of Guatemala. There are only a handful of people left alive who still know what it is to walk underneath iron gates with the words “ARBEIT MACHT FREI” written above. The films made by those who attempt to understand what it is they went through are in some ways running an admirable fool’s errand. But that doesn’t mean giving up. The journey is what matters — both for filmmakers and for audiences.

Fedor Tot (@redrightman) is a Yugoslav-born, Wales-raised freelance film critic and editor, specialising in the cinema of the ex-Yugoslav region. Beyond that he also has an interest in film history, particularly in the way film as a business affects and decides the function of film as an art.