Bosnia’s candidate for the Academy Award, 'Quo Vadis, Aida?' - a film by award-winning director Jasmila Zbanic about the 1995 Srebrenica genocide - was shot with a serious time distance which allowed it to be made without prejudice, said one of the actors, Emir Hadzihafizbegovic, on Friday.
Hadzihafizbegovic, who himself lost nearly 30 members of his wider family in the 1995 mass execution of Bosniak civilians after Serb forces ran over the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, played a Serb soldier who entered the Dutch compound where Bosniak civilians tried to find shelter under the UN flag.
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“It wasn’t easy,” he told N1. “The first day was the most difficult and Jasmila mentioned that day in many interviews. We had to interrupt the filming because the extras were disturbed by the dramatic situation prescribed by the screenplay. At some point they could not distinguish fiction from reality,” he said, noting that this was not a surprise, having in mind that many of them were themselves inmates of prison camps during the war.
“I think that it is good the movie was done from a serious time distance,” he said, explaining that all sensitive events from the war, including genocide, wartime rape, concentration camps or the Sarajevo siege should be approached only after some time has passed.
“Spielberg's ‘Schindler’s List’ was the most accurate and the best movie shot about the Holocaust and it was made 40 years after the pogrom of Jews,” Hadzihafizbegovic said.
Quo Vadis, Aida? Is a “smartly directed movie, without fervor and prejudice,” he added.
“I am particularly sensitive about the Srebrenica genocide,” the actor confessed, explaining that both of his parents are from that town and that he spent his summers there.
He said he also felt the movie was disturbing as fascism is not dead and war criminals are still being glorified so that one has the feeling that what is presented in the movie is in fact still ongoing in a way.
“Genocide executors do not belong to any nation or even human species,” Hadzihafizbegovic concluded. “We need a new word for people who keep shooting at people for six hours in a row.”
