Jasmila Zbanic’s “Quo Vadis, Aida?,” the Bosnia and Herzegovina entry in the Academy Awards’ international feature category, will open the 25th edition of the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK). Quo Vadis, Aida?, deals with one of the war’s most heinous atrocities: the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, during which Bosnian Serb forces under the command of Ratko Mladić executed more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys – a genocide the United Nations forces deployed to protect the inhabitants of the supposedly “safe area” of Srebrenica did almost nothing to prevent. By the time of Srebrenica, Žbanić had been living under siege in Sarajevo for almost three years; she might have been preoccupied only with her own problems. But what she heard in the weeks and months that followed stayed with her. “Here was another shock,” she says. “This was a UN-protected area. We felt that if the aggression could not be stopped by the UN, then there were no human rights we could believe in – and from that moment, I was obsessed. I wanted to know everything about it. It was a trauma for all Bosnians. When we learned how many people had died, and how they had died, and how they were buried. When we learned that the graves had been moved [in an effort to cover up the massacre].”
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