I'm not proud to say it, but I was barely paying attention to the war in Bosnia when it was happening. "Quo Vadis, Aida?" brings it right into your living room with all the immediacy of a documentary. It's a gut wrenching, sensational film.
Jasna Djuricic carries the entire movie as Aida, a U. N. translator who spends the entire film trying to use her minimal influence to keep her husband and two sons safe. The movie isn't about the Bosnian war in general but rather about the events leading up to a massacre in Srebenica. Substitute school buses for train cars and the whole episode was chillingly reminiscent of something you would have seen during the Holocaust. The movie is a matter of fact rendering of the desperation and chaos surrounding that terrible event, and it's refreshing to find a movie that knows its subject is powerful enough to speak for itself without needing to manipulate our feelings with a bunch of cinematic editorializing.
In no scene is this choice more effective than the one that finds Aida wandering around a room with a bunch of other women who've been asked to identify piles of bones that used to be their male relations.
And that last scene. Good Lord. I can't even imagine sitting at a school concert among the very men who murdered my family. It's movies like this that make me feel like I've literally never had a real problem in my entire life.
Grade: A.
Jasna Djuricic carries the entire movie as Aida, a U. N. translator who spends the entire film trying to use her minimal influence to keep her husband and two sons safe. The movie isn't about the Bosnian war in general but rather about the events leading up to a massacre in Srebenica. Substitute school buses for train cars and the whole episode was chillingly reminiscent of something you would have seen during the Holocaust. The movie is a matter of fact rendering of the desperation and chaos surrounding that terrible event, and it's refreshing to find a movie that knows its subject is powerful enough to speak for itself without needing to manipulate our feelings with a bunch of cinematic editorializing.
In no scene is this choice more effective than the one that finds Aida wandering around a room with a bunch of other women who've been asked to identify piles of bones that used to be their male relations.
And that last scene. Good Lord. I can't even imagine sitting at a school concert among the very men who murdered my family. It's movies like this that make me feel like I've literally never had a real problem in my entire life.
Grade: A.