Streaming: ‘Quo Vadis, Aida?’ shines light on Bosnian War

“Quo Vadis, Aida?” earned a Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award nomination for its unflinching account of an awful slice of history from the Bosnian War. It opens with a tank driving over a tree on the outskirts of the city of Srebrenica in newly-formed Bosnia and Herzegovina. It’s the summer of 1995 and we hear that Serbian military forces are turning the area into “a vast slaughterhouse” for Muslim Bosniak peoples.

Leaders of the Dutch UN peacekeeping forces, Colonel Karremans (Johan Heldenbergh) and Major Franken (Raymond Thiry), promise that NATO airstrikes will stop the advance of the Serbian troops, and insist that Srebrenica is a designated UN safe-zone. But the air cover never arrives and citizens flee their homes before the advancing troops of General Mladić (Boris Isaković). The mayor is unceremoniously shot to death outside his apartment and Mladić declares the town “a gift to the Serbian people” in a propaganda video he’s shooting on his genocidal campaign.

Our heroine, Aida (Jasna Đuričić), works as a translator for the UN and tries to use information gleaned from her work to protect the lives of her husband Nihad (Izudin Bajrović) and teenage sons Hamdija (Boris Ler) and Sejo (Dino Bajrović). Unlike the UN leadership, she’s able to understand what General Mladić means when he insists to Karremans that, “I guarantee the safety of all innocent people.” With her family, Aida marches alongside tens of thousands of refugees to Potočari, the makeshift UN headquarters in an abandoned factory. The facility lacks food and running water, and the Bosniaks must rely on Karremans and 370 callow UN soldiers to keep them safe from General Mladić.

Written, directed and produced by Jasmila Žbanić, the film is a worthwhile labor of historical remembering, with many striking, clear-eyed shots of a deteriorating situation. The most successful passages are long tracking shots that capture the full range of people huddled in a tragic “safe zone.” Aida plays a completely insane role at Potočari, working as translator, negotiator, crowd controller, field nurse, wife and mother. Žbanić offers one flashback to happier times — a “East Bosnia’s Best Hairstyle 1991” competition — but that’s it for levity.

The film presents lots of difficult, wrenching facts, most obviously that Karremans and Franken are unforgivably spineless — even their mustaches look wishy-washy as they claim to be doing “everything in their power” to avoid wanton murder. There inaction is as enraging as the genocidal glint in General Mladić’s eyes. UN soldiers, silly in their camouflaged shorts, put up lines of police tape, as if that will have any effect in halting the terror when Mladić separates the men from women and children and puts them on buses to “safety.”

Although it depicts the lead-up to a massacre, “Quo Vadis, Aida?” is not a particularly violent film. It works through the dread of anticipation and Aida’s nightmarish attempts to find a place for her family to hide. In an epilogue set some years in the future, we see a post-genocidal Srebrenica, where Aida still does not blink when presented with horrible situations. A jumble of emotions arises when a long tracking shot examines some familiar faces in the crowd at an elementary school play. Who still lives there, and who remembers?