Srebrenica Film Tells a Mother’s Story about Surviving Genocide

It strikes a balance between authenticity - the film largely presents court-established facts about the Srebrenica genocide - and the artistic need to send a strong message. Zbanic uses characters that are based on real people, like Ratko Mladic, or UN commanders Thomas Karremans and Robert Franken, but creates others to represent the fate of the thousands of Bosniaks who suffered.

This is not a typical war movie, however, but a personal drama about a mother who tries to save her children.

As suggested by the title ('Where Are You Going, Aida?'), the film is driven by movement: Aida wanders around the Dutch UN peacekeeping troops' base in Potocari, near Srebrenica, which served as a meeting point for Bosniaks trying to escape the Bosnian Serb military, going from one officer to another, asking for help for her own family and for the other terrified civilians.

She only stops moving when her husband and sons are separated from her by Bosnian Serb troops in order to be taken away, and Dutch soldiers prevent her from rejoining them.

Writing about the film for US entertainment magazine Variety, Jessica Kiang compared it to 'Sophie's Choice', a 1982 drama about a Jewish mother of two children who is imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and has to choose between the lives of her two children.

In Zbanic's film, as Aida sees her loved ones for the last time before they are handed over to Bosnian Serb forces, she asks the Dutch soldiers to save at least one of her children.

Fear and denial

Bosniaks from Srebrenica in the film. Photo: Deblokada.ba

'Quo Vadis, Aida?' also shows that genocide doesn't happen in a vacuum - its witnesses and perpetrators, and those who stand by and just...