In cinema, we have an interesting qualification for films that were made a decade ago. When we say a film “ages well,” we mean it hasn’t been overtaken by time—it remains relevant and corresponds with the present. I often shudder when viewers tell me my film Remake is visionary, because it reflects a generational fear of stories being retold or remade, which is also the title of the film. I approached my debut as a 32-year-old with the unsettling feeling that nothing in Bosnia and Herzegovina moves in a linear and developmental way but rather in circles, repetitively. Hence, everything that happens is merely a remake of something from the past. It has been twenty years since the Rotterdam world premiere and screening of Remake, a film based on the true story of my friend and writer Zlatko Topčić and his father Zaim. Their fate is one among a series of transgenerational traumas experienced by all citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The film’s ending was a writer/directorial intervention in the story: after returning from exile in Paris to Sarajevo’s war, the protagonist Tarik encounters his pre-war friend Miro during an attack on a Serbian bunker. Now the Serbian soldier, Miro pulls the pin from a grenade, making a domestic film gesture, and they both die. Friends often criticized me, saying this ending was defeatist and left no hope. I fought with that feeling intensely then, as I still do, and couldn’t resist it. Even the German writer Remarque wrote that war kills even those who think they have survived it. Most of my friends suffer from PTSD, and I deal with it by refusing to acknowledge it.

The most terrible aspect of war is the uncertainty and helplessness, waiting for someone’s threats to materialize. This is why I rarely speak of war in any setting; it makes me uncomfortable, as I know many don’t understand, even though this experience permanently shaped me as both a person and an artist. Nearly thirty years after the wars of the 1990s in the Balkans, the struggle for the present and future partly consists of falsifying the past, fighting for control over it. Confronting the past is, therefore, a political dance without end. Artistic language in confronting the past can unpack the malignant, unacceptable narratives that shielded and defended crime, allowing them to be deconstructed and preventing them from becoming a toxic societal legacy for future generations. The past is not a monolith; we cannot face it as a society in one massive totality called the past. These wartime wounds are carefully tended to, with regime-controlled media and politicians ensuring they never heal, keeping them fresh. They are purposefully refreshed to maintain a wartime narrative, socially constructed to create a community of martyrs locked in a mournful stance, pointing fingers at others as responsible for their own misfortunes.

An artistic work should not carry a particular ideological agenda exclusively. It must stand on its own, whole, without being propaganda, for or against something. In that sense, I want to highlight the work of my colleague Jasmila Žbanić, whose film Grbavica powerfully explores the love between a mother and daughter, making that love strong enough to transcend the fact that the child was born from wartime rape. Grbavica is a rare example of a successful film bringing about societal change, as it led to the legal recognition of the status and rights of victims of wartime sexual violence for the first time. The essence of the film confronts us with the reality that many viewers were shocked to discover the extent of wartime sexual violence and to learn that these women lacked legal recognition as civilian war victims. If a film prompts societal dialogue and continues to resonate with audiences in the media space with understanding, compassion, and empathy, then that’s a great success for its creators and a societal benefit for all.

I believe that Quo Vadis, Aida, also by Žbanić, carried a social context beyond the film itself. Besides being a testimony to ensure the Srebrenica genocide is never forgotten, as well as to prevent denial of all genocides that occurred in this region, the humanistic value of this film is that it wasn’t created to incite further division and conflict. On the contrary, it was made for us to better understand each other and, as the director herself said, to “hopefully love each other more.” Artists possess a developed sense of recognizing spiritual unrest before anyone else when freedom disappears and radicalism and totalitarianism emerge as historical horrors in authoritarian states. True art has always resisted such regimes, remaining a sole space of freedom that gifts us with thoughts and feelings through which we explore and listen to the world around us. Through the greatest works of art, we have always understood the importance of interaction, generosity, and giving—the foundations of social solidarity.

We have historical memories of highly repressive methods of imposing beliefs through various ideologies, religions, or national sentiments as exclusive rules of political behavior, which ended in Balkan bloodshed (and, unfortunately, I’m not certain it’s unrepeatable in the future). Every forced imposition of thoughts or feelings on someone else, individually or collectively, is a form of fundamentalism that threatens the realm of freedom. Against such regime tendencies, we must raise our voices, respond, and defend the principle of freedom as a space that opens the door to all other spiritual dimensions. Without this freedom, overtaken by fatalism and fanaticism, a person is no longer humane, becoming a slave to darkness and bleak thoughts, condemned to a society advancing toward anti-modernism and anti-humanism.

Many predicted a democratic wave of freedom in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall as a signal of an end to wars, oppression, and history as power, believing in the coming of an era where human history would be grounded in our ability to speak, think, and communicate with each other. Unfortunately, the example of the breakup of ex-Yugoslavia soon revealed we were far from that state of mind. I belong to a generation that deeply understands freedom, so I believe the fight for democracy as a guarantee of freedom is meaningful and is our only salvation. Day by day, attempts are made to suspend our freedom, disappearing as an ideal both within political parties and in human relationships, where ethnic collectives usurp the individual’s right to freedom and dignity.

After decades of ethnic tyranny, we have almost lost freedom of thought, speech, and the liberty to think differently, to be different, to have different views; without such freedom, there is no human dignity.

Memory is life, constantly created by human groups, always changing, much like art, which is based on emotions and magic. Art opens up dialectical memory for critical reexamination of the phrase “It used to be…”—a haunting historical phrase often used to conceal hatred, struggle, and human sorrow. Thus, humans, especially historical humans who make their past a duty, define themselves through it and uncover their present. This is why we all have a past, but we create history for ourselves.

Most films that cover the topic of dealing with the past are a collaborative effort between Sarajevo, Zagreb, and Belgrade, aiming to shed artistic light on who we were, who we want to be, and who we hope to become in the future. We want to explain history to ourselves, enter the labyrinths of memory, which is by nature multifaceted, collective, plural, and individualized. The art of memory is rooted in images, objects, and the details of actions, tied to the relationship between people and places. It has the right to discontinuities, distortions, and emotions, which is why it is always skeptical of history. Film does not memorialize memories, does not turn them into stone monuments, nor does it create institutional or official narratives that become places of unanimity and one-sided militant beliefs in “learned truths.” Aware that they live here and now, every filmmaker wants to tell a story open to the breadth of various meanings yet condensed in a personal relationship with their own past. Film’s creative alchemy, in a peculiar way, turns dealing with history into a repository of present-day secrets, allowing us to break through into the future of memory.

A film that captures the microcosmos of an individual or family reflects an intimate and personal connection, a transformation in perception in this era of the “explosion of memory” that gives meaning and life to history so that it doesn’t become an excess that burdens generations but instead becomes a space for understanding the past.

Dino Mustafić, Director