Quo Vadis, Aida? (Jasmila Žbanić, 2020) (Patreon)

Quo Vadis, Aida? is fine work by any standard, but leave it to me to find some niggling problems with it. Žbanić's film is well acted, expertly shot and edited, and successfully conveys the horrible inevitability of the 1995 Srebrenica Massacre is Bosnia. Bosnia Muslims knew full well what was coming, partly because they were no strangers to the almost gleeful butchery of Serbia's Army of Republika Srpska. General Ratko Mladić (Boris Isaković) was notorious by this time as a willing agent of ethnic cleansing. But Quo Vadis also works to show that utter incompetence by the UN peacekeeping forces was equally to blame. There was no reliable chain of command, communication with UN headquarters was nonexistent, and if we can trust Žbanić's film (which is based on eyewitness testimony), the Dutch commander of the Srebrenica peacekeepers, Col. Thom Karremans (Johan Heldenbergh) was too intimidated by Mladić to actually stand up to him.

The only real problem with Quo Vadis, Aida? is that it fits far too comfortably within the war-film genre and its liberal-bourgeois affectations. In order to convey the magnitude of the disaster in Srebrenica, Žbanić focuses our attention on a single individual, Aida (Jasna Đuričić), a Bosnian teacher who has been hired as an interpreter by the UN. This is a perfectly literary maneuver, since Aida's position forces her into a liminal space. She has become separate from the tens of thousands of Bosnians around her, because she has a blue UN nametag that allows her access into the (so-called) protected zone. Meanwhile, UN personnel routinely order her around, and the Serbians, for the most part, treat her like just another piece of trash.

While our focus on Aida "personalizes" Srebrenica, it also makes for a rather simplistic point of identification. Aida and her husband (Izudin Bajrović) are educated, and this affords them special privileges, up to a point. But it also helps a Western viewer to differentiate Aida from the horde of faceless Muslims around her. And while it is only natural that Aida would try to convince her UN superiors to make an exception and save her husband and two sons (Boris Ler and Dino Bajrović), this exceptionalist tunnel vision connects too conveniently with the film's form, which is always singling Aida out as unique.

In a sense, it feels churlish to fault Quo Vadis for doing the kinds of things that war movies almost always do. And yet, this is a film that is precisely about dehumanization, the extermination of a group of people whose only crime was their ethnic and religious identity. When we consider that anti-Muslim sentiment hasn't abated since 1995, to put it mildly, it behooves Žbanić to find a new way to tell this story, one that can complicate the human tendency to massify the Other. One scene indicates that Žbanić is aware of this -- a flashback to a dance party, where each person in the circle is held on camera for a beat. But the Bosnians didn't stop being individuals when the war broke out. Quo Vadis, Aida? should've worked to see farther than the UN did, and with much more humanity than the Serbs.