104 min | NR | March 5, 2021 | Super LTD
A UN translator in Srebrenica spends a few hours trying to use her position to get her husband and two sons inside the safe zone before the Serb army comes for them. She has the documents. She has the access. None of it is enough.
Aida Selmanagić works as a translator for the United Nations in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in July 1995. Serb forces under General Ratko Mladić have taken the town. Thousands of Muslim civilians flee to the UN base seeking protection from peacekeepers who do not have the means or the will to provide it. Aida moves between the Dutch officers giving useless assurances and the families crushed at the gates, and somewhere in that crowd are her husband and two sons. The film is about a woman who can read the disaster coming in real time and who uses every ounce of her access to bend the bureaucracy toward saving three people.
Jasna Đuričić plays Aida as a woman running on calculation and terror in equal measure. She works the corridors of the base with the fluency of someone who knows how institutions function and the desperation of someone who knows this one is failing. Đuričić lets the professional mask slip only in private flashes, then snaps it back into place to keep negotiating. Johan Heldenbergh plays Colonel Karremans as a man drowning in his own impotence, requesting air support that will not come and signing papers that mean nothing. Boris Isaković plays Mladić with the unhurried calm of a man who already knows he has won, handing out chocolate and staging photo ops while his soldiers prepare the buses.
Jasmila Žbanić writes and directs with a procedural patience that turns logistics into dread. She stages much of the film as movement through space. Aida pushes through hallways, across the compound, past checkpoints, and the geography of the base becomes a map of who gets to live. The handheld camera stays close on Đuričić, so the audience experiences the genocide at the scale of one person trying to get through one more door. Žbanić withholds the score for long stretches and lets the sound of the crowd and the diesel engines carry the tension, which makes the eventual quiet of the loaded buses unbearable.
This is a film about the exact moment institutional language fails to map onto reality. Aida keeps invoking rules and lists and guarantees because they are the only tools she has, and the film tracks how each one dissolves on contact with men who have decided to murder. Žbanić refuses to let the camera leave the human level for the historical one until the very end, when she shows what continuity looks like for the people who stayed. The result is a precise account of how a town gets erased while the paperwork stays in order.