The two documentaries shown at SFF give an insight into the primal desire for creativity regardless of the circumstances.

Photo: Detektor.ba/ Screenshot of the movie Samir Mehić Bowie - Letters from Srebrenica

One of the ways of framing certain historical events in the domain of collective memories happens, among other things, with the help of audiovisual media. The development of technology and the ability of satellite transmitters to spread images much faster than before, made it possible for the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina to become a media event that people followed in real time, a conflict that was explained to the audience from the sidelines with the help of moving images. Extensive archives were created, and certain materials could be used as evidence at trials.

In the book Iconic events, media scholar Patricia Leavy analyses the events that have become embedded in the American collective memory with the help of the media, from the sinking of the Titanic to September 11. She is primarily interested in contextual changes in media representations and claims that they testify more to social changes than to events per se. Leavy defines an iconic event as an event that experiences intense initial interpretations, turns into a myth within its own culture and is eventually presented within the framework of commercial culture. The political, ideological, media and cultural impact that the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina left behind is enormous, and certain events have outgrown the collective cultural memory. The daily depiction of the siege of Sarajevo and the demolition of the bridge in Mostar were the visual backdrops of the 1990s, part of the global presentation of the war on the Balkan Peninsula, images that live their own lives today, somewhat even unrelated to the narrative of the war they describe.

Due to the development of digital technology, the recordings of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina led to an unprecedented documentation of the crimes committed. One such case relates to Srebrenica and the material recorded by the Scorpion unit, during the executions in July 1995. In one of the many sinister moments, the cameraman hastens the liquidation because "the battery is dying". In these moments, the camera is both a witness and an active subject of the act of violence because the very moment of killing is a choreographed performance created to document it. This morbid material was recorded for a specific "audience", people who participated in or supported ethnic cleansing. Among other things, this was also the reason that the video could be used as evidence of war crimes committed.

But the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina was not only a satellite war, but also a "home video" war. Ordinary people also had access to simple cameras and filmed events in their immediate vicinity. The images of the war in private recordings showed micro perspectives and personal stories, recorded as video chronicles of abnormal times. The private recordings of local cameramen are important documents of everyday life during the wartime. Much of the material is available on You Tube. Thus, for example, Ibro Zahirović (Filming Horror: How Videographer Captured Srebrenica’s Last Moments Before Genocide | Balkan Insight; In Srebrenica's Darkest Hour, a Videographer Shone a Light - New Lines Magazine) and Velid Delić (Video Messages from the Dead of Srebrenica | Balkan Insight) are the most famous video chroniclers of life in the besieged Srebrenica, and their videos give an insight into a wider picture of the siege of the city.

Two films that are shown at the Sarajevo Film Festival this year and that use written materials and private archives and in different ways nuance certain ideas about the representation of the genocide in Srebrenica are the films Samir Mehić Bowie - Letters from Srebrenica, authored by Lamija Grebo from the Balkan Research Network of BiH, and My Father's Diaries, by Ado Hasanović.

Bowie is a half-hour film reconstruction of parts of the life of musician Samir Mehić, before and during the war in Srebrenica. The author uses various ways of bringing the talented Samir to life, among other things through the dramatization of certain segments of his life with the help of the actor Igor Skvarica, who embodies him. We also get an insight into Mehić's letters sent through the Red Cross to his musical colleague and friend Faruk Smajlović. Letters, interviews with musician friends and his widow Nermina, as well as some private archive footage make the story of Mehić richer and more nuanced. The image of a young man is revealed before us, completely unprepared for the horrors of the siege and the everyday life of wartime Srebrenica. Through correspondence with drummer Faruk, we enter Bowie's intimate and existential doubts, but also into moments in which he is in a good mood, in which he fantasizes about a life and everyday life that could have been, but unfortunately never happened.

Hasanović's film is to some extent an attempt to reconstruct the memory of the war through the lens of the director's father, Bekir. During the siege of Srebrenica, Bekir, together with his friends, filmed everyday life during the war. Their alter egos "Boys, Ben and John" are presented in a slightly comic manner, but we soon realize that the recording is an attempt to explain and document all the chaos of war on the one hand, and on the other hand an attempt to remain as normal as possible. Life in Srebrenica becomes more and more unbearable and Bekir becomes more and more depressed as time passes. The material is sometimes exclusively documentary, but also contains sequences in which key incidents are reconstructed with the help of soldiers and other participants.

Part of the strength of the film comes from the discrepancy between the footage of the young and energetic Bekir, who fights for his place in front of the camera even though he is mostly filming the others, the diary entries in which we learn about his vulnerability and introversion, and the footage of the somewhat rough and reserved father of the family who does not want to remember the past. Bekir's trauma is only hinted at because he does not want to talk about it. Every attempt by Ado to get his father to reminisce is in vain. Bekir is irritated and grumbles, but on a couple of occasions he slightly opens the door to the past, maybe he himself scared by what he carries inside him.

Hasanović's film is deeply personal but not too didactic. In one scene, Ado's mother Fatima, while watching some of the filmed segments, briefly states that almost no one from the footage, which shows quite a large group of people, survived. The correspondence between the present and the past is thus fragmented and remains in eternal discontinuity. The people from the recordings are gone and will never be again. Bekir's recordings are important documents of human existence, but at the same time they are also a melancholic evocation of spirits, seen from today's perspective. We get a similar impression watching Bowie. Grebo brings the protagonist, his thoughts and fears to life for us, but at the same time we are aware of the eternal and irreparable loss.

Both films nuance the lives of people in the Srebrenica enclave. We get an insight into details about which we potentially know little: about concerts, about changing strings that are not there, about the design of smaller turbines on the water into which the batteries for the cameras would be plugged to be charged. We get an insight into the primordial desire for creativity that cannot be completely eradicated, regardless of the circumstances. In Mehić's case it is music, the urge to play as a break from everything, and in Hasanović's it is filmmaking, not only as a mere registration of reality but also as a means of creative expression.

Neither Bowie nor the Diaries reduce their protagonists to mere victims. In narrating the genocide in Srebrenica, it is still important to get as complex a picture as possible of both those killed and those who survived. Only in this way can we build credible bridges between personal and universal experiences. At some point, Bekir finds a lover with whom he lives while Fatima and the children are taken care of safely. He films her amorously, writes about her in his diaries. At the end of the day, it is she who will take the material to safety.
Both films avoid talking about Srebrenica only through the optics of genocide, although it is of course omnipresent. The time frame is wider than July 1995 itself, so we get an insight into the context of the development of the situation in the city and the development of claustrophobia, which is becoming more and more tangible.

Archive footage has been widely used in documentaries about different segments of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina over the last thirty years. There is a wide range of materials used, depending on the purpose, theme, aesthetics and the very form of the films. Due to the very nature of new discoveries and digitization of archives, whether private or public, we will continue to correspond with the past in various ways for a long time to come. The recordings of the mentioned Ibro Zahirović and Velid Delić thus gain strength, they are given the much-needed context and dramaturgy, framing into stories that are bigger than the fragmented materials. Zahirović's footage was incorporated into Grebo's film, and we could already watch Srebrenica Cenotaph – Velid's Final Tape by Haris Prolić, which uses Delić's footage of people in besieged Srebrenica. Hasanović acts in a similar way too when he edits his father's point-of-view into a personal story about trauma and medialized memories.

For many years now, I have considered documentary production in the region to be superior to feature production. A large number of high-quality documentary films, as well as festivals, testify to innovative narratological, aesthetic and formal ways of looking back at the past. Films that compile pre-existing archival material can help us map seemingly unrelated footage into nuanced works that can answer certain questions to some extent. Bowie and My Father's Diaries continue to draw on private and public archives, and do so powerfully, somewhat innovatively, authentically, and truthfully.