Quo Vadis, Aida?

Quo Vadis, Aida? falls into the weird in-between category created by AMPAS’s alteration to the rules for Oscar eligibility last year: It wasn’t officially released in the United States until 2021, but was nominated for the Best International Film in the 2020 cycle because it was released before the end of February (and was submitted by Bosnia and Herzegovina). Available to stream on Hulu, with perhaps the most incongruous commercial breaks in film history, the film is an unstinting look at the genocide of Bosnian Muslims, mostly men, during the Srebrenica massacre of 1995.

Aida is a translator for the UN’s peacekeeping force at the UNPROFOR base in Srebrenica, as well as a schoolteacher and mother of two teenaged boys. The film all takes place over a matter of hours as Serbian forces take over the town and residents flee, with several thousand entering the base but thousands more gathering outside to try to gain entry. Serbian Gen. Ratko Mladic, now a convicted war criminal known as the “Butcher of Bosnia,” offers safe passage out of Srebrenica to any Bosnian Muslims who wish it, but Aida is one of the few who suspects that the offer of safety is fake. She pleads with the Dutch peacekeepers to keep her family safe on the base, even as those same forces find themselves impotent in the face of Serbian arms, with the promised air support from NATO never materializing.

If you’re familiar with the Srebrenica massacre, you may have some idea how this is all going to turn out. Serb forces slaughtered more than 8000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, raped thousands of women and girls, and tortured more civilians. They threw the victims’ corpses in mass graves. Much of the massacre took place just outside of the base – the buses that were supposed to take the men to safety simply drove beyond the ‘safe’ area and emptied their passengers so Serb soldiers could murder them. Many of these war crimes were caught on film; some perpetrators were later charged by the Hague, including Mladic, although saying they were brought to justice implies justice is even possible in a case like this. The current mayor of Srebrenica and current Prime Minister of the Republika Srpska, one of the two divisions of the current government of Bosnia and Herzegovina, both deny that the massacre and genocide even occurred.

Aida, played by Aida Selmanagi? – her husband plays Mladi? – is perfect as a woman who sees disaster impending and feels powerless to stop it, but will try anything to save her family. The tension on her face provides the film with all of the intensity of a thriller, even though there is no actual violence until near the very end of the story. Her desperation increases by degrees, as with the frog in the pot of slowly boiling water, so that she may not fully realize how hopeless her situation is until well past the point that hope was gone. Aida survives, but there is no redemption in the ending here; if anything, the script underlines to the endless horror of those who do survive a genocide, and then are faced with daily reminders of what they’ve lost, of those who lost less (or even gained), and of those who did nothing while these crimes took place.

I don’t watch horror movies that rely on violence to create fear in the viewer, because I simply can’t adjust my mind to a worldview that finds entertainment in human suffering. Quo Vadis, Aida? is a horror movie of a different sort. You know this has to end badly for Aida and her family, somehow, because you know the world sat on its hands and watched as the Serbs murdered 8000-plus men simply because they were Muslims, as over 60,000 Bosniaks were killed in the war. You feel horror for Aida, and shame at the impotence of the peacekeepers and at the willful blindness of the west, rather than cheap fear from body horror or, worse, the lurid entertainment that some people feel from rooting for a killer. Quo Vadis, Aida? is a great film, shouting an important piece of history from the hilltops, but it’s anti-entertainment by design. You want to avert your eyes, but if you do, you’re complicit in the crime.