Les femmes de Visegrad

A middle-aged Australian dancer, Kym, travels through Visegrad (in the Serbian part of Bosnia) and finds out afterwards that the sights she admired the hotel she stayed in were scenes of war crimes during the Bosnian War in the 1990ies. She then returns and becomes paranoid about everyone she meets, wondering what they had done during the war and if they might have been implied in the atrocities. The local police become wary of her snooping around and pressure her to leave. The film ends with her performing a kind of art installation at one of the crime sites, a hotel.

This would have been a much better film if Jasmila Zbanic would have emphasised the moral ambiguity of Kym, who is actually played by the Kym Vercoe who also wrote the script based on a performance which was also written by Kym Vercoe. I hope I got that right. Kym is a woman who is "haunted by the atrocities". Why? Her attitude towards the Bosnian War seems to be self-righteous, lofty and obsessive. Kind of like a Serbian traveling to Sidney to accuse white Australians of having stolen the land they are living on from the aborigines.

I didn't appreciate this film as much as Esma's Secret and Na Putu, in which Jasmila Zbanic shows her talent of narrating a complex story indirectly.

The only good things in this movie is that it is referencing important historic event of Bosnian war, and bit emotional, empathic, artistic, and unique. Unique because looks like actor is at the same time real person, and because it give too real insight of tourist or foreigner's experience of our country. As Bosniak I rated this bit higher than it deserves because I was born in war, and it is more relatable to me than to most people, and because I could recognize language, and many places and stuff. But this is too amateur, simple, empty, and lacks action, depth, characters. Bit funny, bit sad, but at least not time waster. Good for tourists and for Bosniak's who are curious of tourist's viewpoint.

It is a film which deals with geopolitical territorial fight in the disintegration of the Former Yugoslavia in 1992, more specifically in town of Visegrad on the border between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia. Both of those countries were part of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Yugoslavia became a failed state and almost all of the republics which consisted Yugoslavia except Serbia and Montenegro wanted to leave the union. Serbs who lived in the republics outside Serbia suddenly faced prospect of living outside their country. They were very angry to say the least. Serbian leader Milosevic wanted to create new Yugoslavia which would in effect be greater Serbia. Stage was set for a bloody war, first between Serbs and Croats in 1991, and later in 1992 war started in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Eastern Bosnian towns were hit hard by the Serbian onslaught. Muslims who lived on the border towns like Visegrad were in a hard situation. Serbs used town bridge, famous by the literary genius Ivo Andric who won the Nobel Prize for the novel Bridge on the River Drina for a carnal and deadly porn set. Local Serbs helped by the Serbs from Serbia herded local Muslims and gang raped them on the bridge, and slit their throats and threw them into Drina river. Drina was red from the victims blood in those days. Even today there are no plaques to commemorate events of those days. Hotel Vilina Vlas was turned into a jail for local Muslim women where they were raped on the continuous basis. Those who cooperated and willingly engaged in the sexual intercourse with the Serbs managed their way out.

In 2013 Jasmila Zbanic took her crew and used a Serbian producer to act as director since Jasmila is a Muslim and he is not. They said they were filming about Ivo Andric where in effect they did not. Their courage is to be commanded since even today those events are covered up in Visegrad by the locals, and acts like Jasmila*s crew could prove to be deadly. Serbs simply did not want to live in the new Greater Serbia with anyone who is not a Serb. Well my neighbor, since thy I can not love you I can kill you. Those who managed to escape live generally good lives in the Western Europe or USA or Australia. In 1995 a peace was struck in Dayton, Ohio in which Bosnia-Herzegovina survived as a state but is divided into two entities, Federation(not the Star Trek one) where Muslims and Croats live an uneasy life together (Pederacija) yes with the P, and Republika Srpska which is that ethnically pure Serb state Serbs dreamt about. Visegrad, just like Srebrenica and Žepa, are now deep inside Republika Srpska. Should remaining Mulsims and Croats try to return to their place from where they escaped? Answer is a resounding no! They could never prosper surrounded by such hatred by their former Serbs assassins and expulsioners.

Let us commend Jasmila Zbanic and her crew for trying to show to the world what happened. They are real heroes of today dark Bosnia-Herzegovina, and world in general where Moradors are slowly taking over Hobbitlands. Serbs would claim that Republika Srpska is a Hobbitland where Federation is a Morador. Federation on the other hand claims that Republika Srpska is a Morador and Federation is a Hobbitland. Well never mind, geopolitics is mother of all events in this world of ours. Who will know the real truth but God. Which God? Oh never mind we have many of those in Bosnia-Herzegovina, we even paint with luminescent paint Virgin Mary in Medjugorije so she would attract foreign tourists to bring all that hard currency so we could have a hard on. For the next gang rape. They say menstrual cycle comes into Balkans once every 40 years...