Cinema in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

This chapter presents a brief history of Bosnian cinema. The focus is on film adaptations of Bosnian literary sources. Specific approaches to screen adaptations are analysed and compared.

Film in Bosnia and Herzegovina was part of the Socialist Yugoslavia film production until the complete disintegration of the country in 1992. The Yugoslav period was marked by a collaboration of artists and institutions from all Yugoslav republics, so it is often not accurate to label a film made in Yugoslavia as Bosnian, Serbian, or Croatian. Therefore, in this section, I will include films that were the products of collaboration on the state level but mostly made by Bosnian filmmakers and screenwriters or were based on literary works by Bosnian authors.

The major work on the history of Yugoslav film, Pavle Levi’s Disintegration in Frames, offers a detailed investigation into “the complex relationship between aesthetics and ideology in the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav cinema” (Levi 2007, p. 3) and includes films made roughly until the year 2000. The focus of this study is theories and practices of literary adaptations, so the selection of the films is guided by the principle of their relevance for adaptation studies, as well as their significance in illuminating an era in the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

After the referendum in March 1992, Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence, and the collaboration on art projects abruptly stopped. Surprisingly, the war period in Bosnia and Herzegovina, from 1992 to 1995, was extremely productive, and many films locally made during and after the war received international recognition. Post-war filmmaking in Bosnia and Herzegovina has been strongly marked by a renewed collaboration of artists from many parts of the former country and Europe.

In the period before the breakdown of Yugoslavia, the cinematography in Bosnia and Herzegovina was integrated into the Yugoslav film production.

The first film-production company in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosna film, established in 1947 in Sarajevo, produced Major Spook (Major Bauk, dir. Nikola Popović, 1951), the first film made in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is an adaptation of Branko Ćopić’s story of the same name. Ćopić, a well-known Bosnian writer, was also a screenwriter for the film. The film is of the partisan movie genre, popular in Tito’s Yugoslavia, and glorifies the partisans’ fight against Italian fascists and četniks.¹

Sutjeska Film was founded in 1960, and in 1975 it “took over from Bosna film the production and execution of feature films […]. This period marks the beginning of the expansion of BH film in Yugoslavia and abroad” (Katalog BH igranih filmova 1951–1994 2021).

Another landmark in the film production of the country was the partisan film The Battle of Neretva,² starring Orson Welles, Yul Brynner, and Franco Nero (Bitka na Neretvi, dir. Veljko Bulajić, 1969). Pablo Picasso made the poster for the film, which “was back then the largest European production by number of actors, extras and invested funds” (Sarajevo Times March 17, 2016).

The 1960s and the 1970s were the years of Yugoslav political films, especially the Yugoslav Black Wave films critical of the regime. In addition to Dušan Makavejev, Mika Antić, Žika Pavlović, Krsto Papić and Želimir Žilnik, and Lazar Stojanović, filmmakers from Bosnia contributed to the genre.

The Emerging Europa section of January 2022 describes this period in the history of Yugoslav film:

Even though the filmmakers in Yugoslavia had more artistic freedom than those behind the Iron Curtain, “the freedom given to Black Wave artists was not unlimited. WR: Mysteries of the Organism was banned in Yugoslavia and sent Makavejev into exile. Many others suffered the same fate due to the overt anti-communist tones of their work or for depictions of a pessimistic view of society and its development. Validating individualism rather than collectivism was also a cause for official displeasure. (Emerging Europe Jan. 22, 2022)

Similarly, Pavle Levi comments that the filmmakers who were associated with the Yugoslav political cinema of the 1960s not only engaged in making films that were critical of politics in Yugoslavia but also demanded autonomy in expressing their authorial individualism and their “subjective truth” (2007, p. 16). Political films made in the 1970s, often labelled as the films of “the black wave,” received harsh criticism as the authorities accused the filmmakers of “social nihilism” (Levi, p. 46).

The case of the filmmaker from Sarajevo, Bahrudin Bato Čengić illustrates the regime’s strategy of condemnation and banning of controversial films. Čengić’s adaptation of Bora Ćosić’s novel of the same name, The Role of My Family in World Revolution (Uloga moje porodice u svjetskoj revoluciji, 1971), was banned, and the director was forced to stop working on films for over ten years.

Čengić’s adaptation of the cult Serbian novel was a much harsher criticism of the communist ideology compared to Ćosić’s more subtle criticism. Using the grotesque to depict the clash between the party hardliners and the values of the bourgeoise family—which is forced to share their home with the rough newcomers—Čengić’s film was perceived as a daring transgression by the communist authorities. As one critic of the film wrote, “[i]t was exactly the carnivalization of the ideological seriousness that was viewed as reactionary, which earned Čengić notoriety and associated his work with the label ‘black wave,’ that was going to follow the author until the fall of communism” (Agić, Jan. 19, 2019).³

After a long period of silence, Čengić made the film Silent Gunpowder (1990), based on the novel of the same name (Gluvi barut/Silent Gunpowder, 1957) by Branko Ćopić. In an interview for Yugopapir (Čengić 1990), Čengić details his fallout with the regime and refers to the harsh treatment the writer Ćopić received from the communist authorities after he published his novel in 1957.⁴

The novel presents a lengthy historical context of the complex conflict between the neighbouring communities of Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in WWII and rejects a dogmatic approach to the partisan movement prescribed by the Party censors. The novel addressed the “red terror” that the Party justified by its revolutionary goals. Such criticism in the 1950s in Yugoslavia was seen as a serious transgression.

Čengić’s film defies the stereotypes of the partisan film, the most popular film genre in Socialist Yugoslavia. In the interview of May 1990, the filmmaker details his approach to the adaptation of the novel and explains that he wasn’t interested in revolutionary masses, or big battles, typical of the partisan genre, but focused on a couple of main characters; he created a sort of Greek drama in which the characters “go through a catharsis, get purified or die” (Čengić 1990).⁵

Čengić is not interested in large brushstrokes; instead, he focuses on the few individual characters that are “manipulated by the Party” and sacrificed for the greater good, for the dogma. As Čengić explains in the interview, the writer’s “we” is replaced by the filmmaker’s “I.” One of the film’s protagonists nicknamed Španac (the Spaniard)—he volunteered in the Spanish Civil War—represents a revolutionary who becomes a murderer in the name of revolutionary dogma. The novel’s long narrative discourse provides a more complex context for Španac’s actions and makes him a multifaceted and even sympathetic character. In the novel, Španac constantly doubts his actions and compares his experience in the Spanish Civil War with the struggle of the partisans and villagers in the Bosnian backcountry. The film gives a harsher version of Španac, in which the filmmaker blends more than one character from the novel. In the depiction of the second protagonist, Radekić—an officer of the King’s Army from the previous regime (The Kingdom of Yugoslavia from 1918–1941)—the film avoids stereotypes of the partisan film genre “by depicting the ideological conundrum of the peasant partisan commander who is torn between the loyalty to the partisan movement and its communist ideology on the one hand, and the need for a pragmatic alliance with the chetniks on the other hand” (Agić 2019). Čengić challenged the stereotypes about partisans. In the interview, Čengić explains that he departed from the novel in his depiction of Radekić. He had a feeling that when Radekić succeeds in “bringing the people into the fold of the [partisan] movement, he will be the very next victim.” The filmmaker rejected “the novel’s realism” and “its lack of humour,” while humour is “prevalent in Ćopić’s other novels.”⁶

One cult partisan film, still widely popular and seen as a symbol of resistance, is the film Valter Defends Sarajevo (Valter brani Sarajevo dir. Hajrudin Šiba Krvavac, 1972). The film focuses on the Germans’ attempt to destroy the Sarajevo resistance movement and its leader Valter. In the film, Valter is a mysterious resistance fighter whose real identity is known to only a few. After the Gestapo infiltrates the movement, the citizens of Sarajevo defend Valter’s identity, and the real Valter and his comrades thwart the German plans. The famous closing line by a German officer looking at the city from the hill, “Dast ist Walter,” was a slogan used during the siege of Sarajevo. The Festival Viennale, in its 2019 Retrospective section, references this famous scene from the film in the context of the 1990s war in Sarajevo: “Standing on a hill above Sarajevo (the same hill, in a cruel twist of fate, from which Sarajevo would be bombarded only two decades later), a German commander points at the multicultural city below and proclaims: ‘Sehen Sie diese Stadt? Das ist Walter!’” (The Festival Viennale 2019).

In the Bosnian war in the 1990s, the film was often referenced in the context of the new war and of the resistance of its citizens. In Sarajevo there are now clubs, restaurants, and hotels that are named after Valter; there is a museum dedicated to the cult film as the name became the symbol of the city’s resilience.⁷

In 1974 Selimović’s novel Death and the Dervish was adapted for the screen (dir. Zdravko Velimirović). As discussed in the previous chapters, the time structure of the traditional novel is “the time of existence, not of reflection” (Kulenović 1990). Thus, the novel is more suitable for a film adaptation than for the stage. The film adaptation of the novel was slightly short of a successful transformation, mostly because of the low budget (Kulenović, p. 123). Most critics positively evaluated this film adaptation of Death and the Dervish and pointed out that the dramaturg Mihiz (who earlier adapted the novel for stage) “preserved not only the integrity of the novel’s action but also that of the inner life of the protagonist.” The dialogue of the adaptation is praised for being concise. The film is about “silence, rituality, conjuring an atmosphere of the decadence of the [Ottoman] empire” (Vojnov 2015).

The film focuses on the most dramatic sections of the novel, the dialogue is compressed, and the oppressive atmosphere is visually rendered through close-ups, the shots of closed, arched spaces, and narrow cobbled streets and passages. The images of the fortress, of the narrow Ottoman bridges, and the sounds of horses’ hooves carrying riders, bringing bad news of arrests and murders, are dominant.

Most scenes are interiors—in a mosque and rooms opening in the background through many doors. The staging is theatrical and metaphorically conjures the many levels of the oppressive government, its spies lurking from behind hidden passages. The architecture thus becomes part of the film’s plot: the central fortress, the prison, is metonymically represented as a seemingly bottomless stone well where prisoners are brought down on a rope, to disappear into the underworld controlled by the invisible forces that carry out punishments.

Side stories and Nurudin’s long monologues are omitted, the events are predominantly depicted from his point of view, and the novel’s narration is mostly conveyed through visuals and Nurudin’s voice-over. A glance exchanged between Kadia’s wife and Mula Jusuf, Nurudin’s scribe, reveals the important information from the novel’s narration, and Mula Jusuf’s betrayal of Nurudin’s brother Harun is visually conveyed through a minimalistic approach. The past events are depicted through flashbacks, a cut from the close-up shot of Nurudin’s face to the past. The scenes from nature, conjuring Nurudin’s memories of the woman he loved before the war, are in contrast with the repressive Ottoman architecture of the town.

An exception to the decades of political film in Yugoslavia is the Bosnian director Ivica Matić, who in 1972 made the cult film Woman with a Landscape (Žena s krajolikom), the film that marked the shift from the political to the intimate.

The 1980s was an important period for Bosnian cinema as quite a few films made in this period received international recognition. Some of the titles include the films by Emir Kusturica Do You Remember Dolly Bell (Sjećaš li se Dolly Bell? 1982), When Father Went Away on Business (Otac na službenom putu 1985), Time of Gypsies (Dom za vješanje 1988); as well as Scent of the Quinces (Miris dunja 1983) by Mirza Idrizović; and Kuduz (Kuduz 1989) by Ademir Kenović.

The BH. FILM 2012/2013 section explains:

It was a time when the cinema of the former Yugoslavia and BiH had entered the pages of world cinema history books. Kusturica’s films became known everywhere by both the public and film professionals. For the three films he made in the 1980s, he won the Golden Palm at Cannes, Opera Prima Prize at Venice, and numerous other awards. The decade also saw the first film made by a woman director: Vesna Ljubić’s PRKOSNA DELTA (1980). (BH. FILM 2012/2013, pp. 11–17)⁸

In 1981, Emir Kusturica won a silver lion at the Venice Festival for his film Do You Remember Dolly Bell, an adaptation of the story of the same name written by Abdulah Sidran, who was also the screenwriter for the film.

To illustrate the necessary changes to the structure of the adapted text, Elma Tataragić offers the example of Abdulah Sidran’s screenplay for the film Do You Remember Dolly Bell? (Tataragić 2018, p. 232). The screenplay is based on Sidran’s novella of the same name. The adaptation follows the narrative of the novella, but the story structure is significantly changed. The novella begins with a long description of the setting and the main character, young Dino, and places the narrative focus on the theme of coming of age. In the screenplay, Sidran uses the method of condensation and starts the screenplay with a shortened description of the setting, followed by the refrain of the song from the adapted text. Right after this first scene, in which the setting and the central theme are established, Sidran places the “family scene” in which Dino’s father is introduced as a Marxist fond of family debates, which he calls “a small night conference,” a reference to a typical meeting of Party members.

As Tataragić notes, “Sidran condenses his own text very skillfully and creates a new film structure based on his own story” (p. 236).⁹

It is interesting to note—as Tataragić demonstrates—that Sidran’s screenplay is modified in the final film version. In this final version, a later scene is moved to the beginning, so “the film opens—before credits—with a meeting at the community centre where the directors decide to form a pop-music band to prevent crime among the youth.” The change is motivated by the need to create a tight narrative structure. The final scene of the film shows Dino as the lead vocal in the band. The song from the screenplay is also replaced by the song “Con ventri quatro mile bacci,” which becomes “the leitmotif of the film” (Tataragić p. 236).

In the final version, the emotional core of the film is Dino’s relationship with his father, who dies at the end of the movie. The nightly debates with his father about communism and Dino’s obsession with literature about hypnosis function as a bridge between the father and the son (p. 236). Tataragić concludes that “the changes in the final version are not significant, but are important for the film and its dramatic structure” (p. 236).

Perhaps, partly because the screenwriter and the author of the novella are the same person—from the same cultural context—there is no “changing of the focus.” As Portnoy (1998) elaborates, the change of focus is related to “how the writer uses a social issue as the foundation for a screenplay and how the issue in the case of adaptation differs from the issue in the novel” (p. 64).

The film Kuduz (1989), directed by Ademir Kenović, represents a unique case of adaptation of real-life events. Junuz Kečo was an actual person who killed his wife Rasema in a fit of jealousy. The film faithfully depicts the real-life events: Kuduz’s marriage to Badema, his fatherly warm relationship with his stepdaughter Amela (the real names are changed), Badema cheating on him, and his act of murder, the escape and the capture. In real life, after the capture, Kuduz was sent to the notorious Bosnian prison in Foča, and during the war in the 1990s, he escaped and reunited with his stepdaughter. They lived in the same household and were killed in the war. One newspaper article gives a detailed account of the events: “The terrible murder that shook the whole Yugoslavia took place in 1985, near town Hadžići, when Junuz Kečo, in a fit of pathological jealousy, killed his wife with a knife, and afterward was hiding in the nearby woods for a year” (Mrenica 2019).¹⁰

The film avoids the grisly details of the murder and only shows Kuduz getting into a mobile home, and includes the exterior shots of the struggle inside. The real events were much more brutal. In Kečo’s words, Rasema was the woman whom “he loved more than himself … His ambivalent personality is best illustrated with his brutality and at the same time his incredible affection for Rasema’s daughter Sanela.” Also, the article reveals that Kečo escaped from the prison in Foča when the war started and joined his stepdaughter, “whose mother he had murdered … In August 1993, Sanela, who was then 14, and Kečo, who was 50, were killed by a sniper.” However, the story about the sniper was never confirmed. There are rumours that it was a set-up. The writer of the article concludes that the events illustrate how life could be larger than fiction, and how Junuz’s “fate has surpassed the film’s version of Kečo’s personal tragedy” (Mrenica 2019).

The early 1990s witnessed the breakdown of the country and its film industry. Bato Čengić’s Silent Gunpowder many view as an accurate prediction of the 1990s war in Yugoslavia.

In 1991, Benjamin Filipović, a graduate of the Prague Film Academy, FAMU, made his debut film Holiday in Sarajevo (Praznik u Sarajevu 1991). It was the last film that Bosnian cinematography produced before the war. The screenplay, based on the idea of the filmmaker Hajrudin Krvavac, was written by the writer Abdulah Sidran (Rodić 2021).

The story of the three main characters, as Rodić points out, “predicts the tripartition of Bosnia and Herzegovina that will follow, and the film’s tragic ending announces the tragedy that was about to befall the country.” Rodić likens the film’s plot about the forbidden love to that of Romeo and Juliet as the fight between the two families has a tragic ending. The film, at the same time, depicts the pre-war multicultural Sarajevo, with the symbolic sounds of the ezan,¹¹ church bells, and a Catholic church choir (Rodić 2021).

In a post-war interview for the Bosnian newspaper Dani, Benjamin Filipović describes a day in the war in Sarajevo, a day when he actually became a filmmaker. It was the day of a horrible massacre in the street of Vase Miskin. The filmmaker happened to be there, looking for his mother, and by chance got hold of a film camera and filmed the horror that was enfolding in front of his eyes:

I grabbed the camera and started filming while actually looking for my mother—luckily, I didn’t find her—and my footage later found its way to Eurovision, and that’s how I became a filmmaker. By pure accident, my documentary report achieved a kind of terrible viewers’ popularity. (Dani Arhiva)

In 1994, while the war was raging in Sarajevo, Filipović, in collaboration with the writer Semezdin Mehmedinović, made the documentary Mizaldo, kraj teatra (Mizaldo, End of Theatre), which the writer Miljenko Jergović named “a manifesto of postmodernism” and Rodić as a postmodern “parody of parody.”

As Jergovic explains,

The film was made during the most difficult year of the war, in the besieged Sarajevo, without electricity, water, and food. It was screened at the Berlin Film Festival, while the authors were not able to attend. (Jergović Sep. 27, 2010)¹²

The film, which centres around the image of the burning of Sarajevo’s main library, is fragmented and combines various found footage with the filmed documentary material.

Rodić analyses the key aspects of the film:

In the film’s opening scene, Benjamin Filipović’s address is on photography […] which he fittingly used to present the film’s thesis that any type of criticism is now definitely replaced by advertisement, so he asks himself if, perhaps, with this film and with his job of filmmaking and of explaining the reality, he inadvertently promoted war. He notes that freedom always poses a risk. (Rodić 2021)

Despite the unimaginably harsh reality of life under the siege, Haris Pašović managed to organise Sarajevo’s first film festival, which later grew into one of the most important film festivals in the region. As Senka Kreso-Hasanović (2020) details in The first season in hell, Theatre life in Sarajevo in 1992/93, it all started when Pašović asked a wartime mayor of Sarajevo to re-establish the popular Sarajevo theatre festival—MESS (Festival of Small and Experimental Stages in Yugoslavia), founded in 1960. The Soros Foundation (Fond Open Society for B&H) supported the festival, which changed its original purpose, became an international film and theatre festival, and became the most important cultural force in the besieged Sarajevo.

Pašović invited Susan Sontag to Sarajevo. Her first two-week visit took place in April 1993, and the second in July of the same year. With actors and actresses from Sarajevo, she staged Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

On October 23, 1993, during the ten-day programme of the festival, more than a hundred films were screened. At a press conference of the opening day, Pašović stated: “We who live in Sarajevo have our human right to live a civilised life, not the life of eating can food, but the right to have a dignity that befits man, where there is a place for our still bleeding soul” (qtd. in Kreso-Hasanović 2020, pp. 4–5).¹³

The war years and the post-war period have been the most creative periods in the film history of BH.¹⁴ Filmmakers, many of them students at the Sarajevo Academy of Performing Arts, took their cameras and recorded the atrocities and life under the siege. Many films made during the war received international recognition. Elma Tataragić and Vedran Fajković in “A Short History of BH Film” point out the following films of that period:

MGM SARAJEVO (MAN-GODMONSTER) was one of the most successful of [the] documentaries: it won the FELIX Award at the European Film Academy. Other important films were Srđan Vuletić’s I BURNT LEGS, Pjer Žalica’s CHILDREN LIKE ANY OTHER, and SALIFE by Sarajevo Group of Artists. (Tataragić and Fajković 2008/2009, p. 19)

During the war, many films were damaged and equipment destroyed. The Sarajevo Film Centre depot occupies the space of the former film studio facility. During the siege of Sarajevo, “the studio was demolished […] and one part of the archive was moved to the TV building. In this way, 88 feature films and almost 700 documentary films were preserved” (Katalog BH igranih filmova 1951–1994 2021, p. 13).

The Post-War Period

The post-war period—from 1995 to the present—is characterised by the marked presence of films from Bosnia and Herzegovina on the international scene.¹⁵ It would be impossible to include all the films and their reception, so I will focus on the most notable examples as well as on the films that could broadly be considered adaptations.

The first decades after the war witnessed an outpouring of creativity and a strong focus on the 1990s war.

Ademir Kenović’s The Perfect Circle (Savršen krug 1997) was the first feature film made after the war. This film could be considered a faithful adaptation of reality. In Kenović’s own words, “Something very precise was taking place in Sarajevo, something which should absolutely be shown in the film: we had to preserve and describe the atmosphere, the state of spirit, the exceptional events which we were facing in Sarajevo” (European Film Awards 1997).

Dino Mustafić’s Remake (2003) uses the autobiographical script of writer Zlatko Topčić and has two parallel plots. One is the true story of the father, Ahmed, who survived a concentration camp in WWII, and the other is the story of his son, Tarik, in the Bosnian war. The film comments on history repeating itself. As Ellen Klein in her review of the film for Philosophy Now observes, “The real power of Remake is not its story about a sad and war-torn past, but it’s foreshadowing an even grimmer future. For Bosnia, there is no way to break the Nietzscheanesque eternal recurrence of war. There can be no happy ending” (Klein 2004).

In 2009, Danis Tanović adapted the novel Circus Columbia by Ivica Djikić and made the film of the same name. The filmmaker explains how Djikić’s novel marked an era:

If Novecento was a film about the start of the 20th century, the beginning of communism, then [Djikić’s] novel is a story about the end of that century. At the same time, this book reminds me of Amarcord and some other films dear to me. In addition to all of this, [the book] has a touch of longing that is found in Bosnian sevdalinkas.¹⁶ (Tanović 2008/2009, p. 158)

In the interview for Cineuropa (2010), Tanović explains that the film “covers three days of 120 pages of the script,” which the director and the writer wrote together, while “the book’s 90 pages cover 12 years. … The film is completely different and it would be fair to say that we only took some motives from the book” (Tanović 2010).

The film adaptation preserves only the first part of the novel, the events that immediately precede the breakout of the war. Its condensed time frame, three days, has a strong dramatic effect. The choice to avoid the war reveals certain nostalgia for the pre-war Yugoslavia. Most of all, a coming-of-age story is at the core of the film.

On the other hand, Tanović’s earlier Oscar-winning¹⁷ film No Man’s Land (2001) is a plunge into the hell of the Bosnian war. In interviews, Tanović points out that he wrote the script in seven days, having had the story in mind for a long time. Unlike typical war films, No Man’s Land does not show combat scenes, and it does not have a hero. As Amy Corbin points out, “Tanović’s deconstruction of war narrative is his refusal to designate a true hero” (Corbin 2006). Corbin also emphasises the film’s lack of a nationalist agenda: “Its point of view is not anchored in any one national perspective, but sees a local ethnic conflict from a roaming vantage point, moving between two soldiers from opposing sides stuck in a stalemate, hamstrung U.N. officials, and an intrusive TV journalist” (2006).

Tanović justifies the film’s pessimistic concluding image of a Bosnian soldier lying on a landmine by the harsh reality of the post-war Bosnia: “The mine is still there even though we are trying to defuse it” (Tanović 2010).

Another internationally recognised filmmaker from Bosnia is Jasmila Žbanić, whose uncompromising films bring into focus the perspectives of female protagonists. Her debut film Grbavica, winner of the Golden Bear at the 2006 Berlinale, among other notable awards, is a story about a Muslim woman who was raped in the war by Serbian extremists. She gave birth to a teenage daughter who wants to know who her real father is. In an interview, Žbanić observes:

I wondered how [raped women] felt about a child they hadn’t wanted. In this case, their love isn’t pure, it’s a very complex emotion. Women are asked to go through a long emotional process in being able to love that unwanted child. It is an experience that involves the woman wholly, along with her entire femininity (Interview with Camillo De Marco, Dec. 5, 2006).

The film had an impact on Bosnian legislation, as the Bosnian government changed its approach to victims of war who were raped: “Until recently, they were not even considered war victims. Only after the film was a campaign started, based on a petition that forced the government to change the law, and now the victims of ethnic rape are finally recognised as war victims” (Žbanić qtd. in De Marco 2006).

Žbanić’s other films have female protagonists who are scarred by the war. Žbanić is one of the many strong voices of female filmmakers and producers in Bosnia.

In 2013, Žbanić made the film For Those Who Can Tell No Tales (Za one koji ne mogu da govore). This film represents a complex adaptation process. It is based on actual events, a story about an Australian tourist, Kym Vercoe, who visited Bosnia intrigued by the book The Bridge on the Drina by the Nobel-Prize-winning author Ivo Andrić. Tim Clancy, an American living in Sarajevo, in his online travel guidebook of tourist destinations, recommended the hotel Vilina Vlas in Višegrad, so Kym decided to stay there. Upon her return to Australia, Kym learns about the war crimes committed in Višegrad. During the war, the hotel Vilina Vlas was a detention centre for Bosnian Muslim women who were systematically raped and tortured there. Horrified, Kym engages in writing and making a theatrical performance titled Seven Kilometers North-East. The performance was a sort of therapy after her traumatic experience in Bosnia. Once again, Kym returned to Sarajevo, where she met Žbanić, who decided to make a film about Kym’s traumatic experience.

One film reviewer points out that the film “reopens the discussion on whether the places where war crimes were committed, prisons and concentration camps, should be marked as such or should they be unmarked and serve their actual purpose” (Sandić-Hadžihasanović 2013).¹⁸

The film has convinced Tim Clancy to remove the hotel Vilina Vlas from his tourist guidebook. The film, based on actual events and inspired by the theatrical performance written by Kym, who is also a co-writer of the film script and plays the film’s protagonist, represents a complex process of adaptation in which life interacts with art on many levels.

In 2016, Danis Tanović released his film Death in Sarajevo, loosely based on the play Hôtel Europe by Bernard-Henri Lévy.¹⁹ In the interview for Cineuropa, Tanović describes his adaptation process. He discloses that he had initially wanted to make a documentary, but he quickly realised that the material is not filmic since Levy’s play is a monodrama, in which “Jacques Weber²⁰ does a one-hour monologue.” Tanović decided to “envelop this piece into [his] kind of story, … [so he] took the most important parts from Levy, that were important to [him] as a Bosnian, and started building around it.” He brings in real people playing themselves in the film, such as Bojan Hadzihalilović, a graphic designer (Tanović 2016).

He shot the film mostly at one location, the Holliday Inn Hotel in Sarajevo. As Tanović elaborates, the film visually symbolises the social structure of Sarajevo society: “I tried to make different kind of worlds, the upper floor, middle, the underground … visually it’s stunning to see Sarajevo from that perspective … The underground is completely red with the bar where the mafia is, all red like in hell … This [visual setup] helped me tell the story … the moment you see the colour you knew where you were” (Tanović 2016).

Levy’s text serves as a sus-text, a frame that situates the film’s plot into a larger context of Levy’s criticism of Europe, its ineffectiveness, its failure to unify and to confront and suppress its destructive nationalisms. Tanović’s good instinct was not to incorporate the play’s long segments but to pick the ones “relevant to him as a Bosnian.” In this way, he did not disrupt the “real” drama happening at the hotel in the historical moment of the hundredth anniversary of Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Tanović allowed historical conflicts to be replayed on the stage of the hotel. The film exposes the squabbles between the film’s characters about politics that obscure their real problem: how to have a decent life in the almost thirty-year-long “transitional stage” in the country’s history.

Jasmila Žbanić’s Quo Vadis, Aida (2020) was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Foreign Film category and won awards all over the world. The film could be considered an adaptation.

The film’s script, written by Žbanić, follows the real-life story of a Bosnian translator in Srebrenica, over two days, which ends in the mass murder of more than 7000 Bosnian Muslims. However, the director decided to tell the story from the perspective of a woman. In the film, the translator Aida desperately tries to save her two sons and husband. Aida tries to plead with the Dutch peacekeepers in charge of the Srebrenica enclave to save her family. The “real” translator was a man, Hasan Nuhanović, whose father, mother, and brother were killed in the massacre. Žbanić bought the right to Nuhanović’s memoir titled Under the UN Flag. In an interview on April 15, 2021, Žbanić addressed Nuhanović’s concerns about the change of the protagonist:

Like Aida, Hasan had to translate to his family, ‘Now you have to leave the base.’ I experienced with documentaries how difficult it is for people to see their own stories on the screen. It was hard for him to understand why I had to change certain things. (Žbanić, April 15, 2021)

Žbanić also points out that she changed some other historical facts:

But film has its own language. Putting in three meetings [between Mladić [a Serb commander] and Colonel Karremans, the unhelpful UN figure, who in reality conversed multiple times, would bore the audience. I was always measuring: is it truthful? Is it ethical? And it was important how survivors saw the film. Some of them would love that I was more harsh when showing the Serbs. Some told me, ‘You didn’t show the killing of babies.’ These [are] facts, I knew. But I had to make sure the audience was able to follow it. It’s true that the reality was even harsher, but it’s still a fictional film, and you have to respect the laws of filmmaking. (April 15, 2021)

A recent example of film adaptation in Bosnian cinema is Aida Begić’s Balada (A Ballad, 2022). It is loosely based on the Bosnian folk ballad Hasanaginica. The ballad was introduced to European audiences in 1774 when an Italian, Alberto Fortis, published his book Viaggio in Dalmazia (Travels into Dalmatia), in which he included the ballad. Goethe’s later translation of the ballad contributed to its popularity in Europe. Hasanaginica has since been translated into many languages and has been subject to various interpretations.

Begić’s film follows the overall plot of Hasanaginica: a mother is separated from her daughter (five children in the ballad). The husband sends her away and does not let her see her children, she moves back in with her family, and the family plots to marry her off. The ballad ends in Hasanaginica’s tragic death.

The folk poem has a dramatic structure: its condensed action hurls the characters forward towards their destinies and intensifies the tension. The source of the dramatic tension is the impossibility of choice: Hasanaginica of the poem has no agency; she acts according to the rules of the patriarchal society—she does not visit her wounded husband as he is recovering after a battle; she cannot act otherwise in the patriarchal society that imposed strict rules on the behaviour of women. Hasanaga, angry and hurt, sends her away. He expected Hasanaginica to do the impossible and to break the rules of the patriarchal society.

The question that the film adaptation poses is if the film’s protagonist, Meri, faces an equally impossible choice in contemporary post-war Sarajevo. What are the limitations to her freedom? How much personal agency can she exercise in her social context?

The central element of the plot—the tragic misunderstanding—is what structurally connects the ballad and the film. Like in the adapted text, there is a misunderstanding between the husband and the wife: in the film, Meri’s partner, the father of her child, refuses to see her because there was a rumour that she had cheated on him, while Meri intimates to her friend that she did not leave the house in two years. In the ballad, one possible reading of the tragic misunderstanding is that Hasanaga was hurt; he misunderstood Hasanaginica’s behaviour. He expected the impossible from her: to disregard the code of behaviour for women in the patriarchal society and to visit her wounded husband, which would put her on display, against the strict rules of society.

The central character of the ballad is radically transformed in the film. Unlike Hasanaginica, Meri is rebellious; she fights with her mother, leaves the house, and moves in with her girlfriend from high school, who fights violent men who threaten her. Still, Meri is a victim of her male-dominant society. By giving into the marriage, she pays for her brother’s gambling debt and saves her mother the trouble of supporting the two of them.

In the interview for the portal Variety, Begić reveals that her character Meri

is not your typical heroine I was trying to show a woman who isn’t exactly strong—she is confused. But when you find yourself in trouble, it’s okay if you can’t immediately handle things or if you are still in love with a man who doesn’t want to live with you anymore. It’s fine to feel lost. These characters also deserve our attention, even though Meri ultimately finds her freedom in art. (Begić Aug. 12, 2022a)

The side plotline of the film is the talent audition: only at the very end do we learn that the whole plot was actually a film that was being made and Meri plays the central role. In the film’s “reality,” she is an actress who, with tongue-in-cheek, reveals that she was only acting and reflects on the impossibility of the right ending. In the film, Meri dies of grief when she is married to Senad, like Hasanaginica in the ballad. The other possible ending that the film-within-the-film plays with is to have the lovers reconcile and overcome their misunderstanding. We see them kiss and embrace, but the actress Meri laughs off that ending as well, talking with the girl actress, her daughter in the film, about the role of art. Begić, in the interview for Cineuropa, explains that she wanted to “experiment with film language,” “to play with clichés,” and “to search for freedom within art.” She decided to end her movie using “a self-ironic approach” (Begić 2022b). The ending plays with more than one possibility of a resolution: Meri’s death, like in the ballad, or reconciliation. The ending has a metafunction—commenting on cliché film endings and the role of art.

There is a moment in the film when the ballad Hasanaginica is directly invoked, a superimposition of the face of a girl reciting the poem for an audition. It is also an in-text reference to the famous comedy show Audicija, which was a hit in the late 1980s in Sarajevo, in which a wannabe actor recites the opening verses of Hasanaginica at the audition for the Academy of Performing Arts in Sarajevo. There is lots of humour mixed with the bleak reality of post-war Sarajevo; the liberating light approach to the tragic material of the ballad Hasanaginica still reveals the hardship women face in contemporary Bosnia.

One great line cuts to the core of the film: What is freedom? “To live without fear,” says Meri when the casting director during the audition asks her the question. This line connects the epochs and destinies of Hasanaginica of the ballad and Meri of the film.

In this overview of Bosnian film, regretfully, many works have been omitted, not on account of their lack of merit but because of the limited scope of this book. The brief overview of Bosnian cinematography presented in this chapter attempts to illuminate different approaches to adaptations of Bosnian literary works, which guided the selection of the films discussed in this chapter.