There are three facts about film as a medium that should be noted here, but also in general. The first is that audiences often forget that film is primarily a commodity intended to bring some kind of profit to investors. This profit isn’t always financial; sometimes it’s “artistic prestige,” shown through various festival awards. The second fact is that film is a medium we associate with reality. No matter how unrealistic or impossible the plots may seem, if well-executed, they are convincing. So, whether we like it or not, film connects with reality. The third fact is that film is (too) often a propaganda tool. Numerous quotes from politicians, from Woodrow Wilson to Lenin and even Trump’s current legal battles over The Apprentice, support this fact.
Film as a medium emerged in 1895. Early films mostly depicted real-life scenes, like Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat or Baby’s Lunch[1]. However, this approach of recording and presenting reality was soon abandoned in favor of storytelling. This shift led to the portrayal of historical events through film, with one of the earliest examples being The Battle of Hampton Roads (1898), which attempted to reconstruct an event from the American Civil War. Soon after, current events were being reconstructed, with a primitive genre called film d’actualité (news films) appearing, presenting brief video recordings or reconstructions of historical events. In those early days, portrayals were sometimes so basic that, for example, a sinking ship would be simulated by submerging a toy in an aquarium. With the arrival of sound, newsreels – short films shown before or between movies – became popular, especially in programs with multiple films. Interestingly, film and visual expression have been linked to war or disasters from the start. Advances in technology, like 16mm cameras, allowed for the first combat footage, and since World War II, we have extensive documentary footage of battles and war zones, while the practice of reconstructing current events also continued. Films about specific wars and battles appeared soon after they occurred. It’s noteworthy that historical events in film are often tied to wars as key points of collective memory, and since WWII, film has, to some extent, shaped the collective historical narrative.
Those who doubt this will be surprised to learn that there are people who believe in the historical narrative from Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, where Hitler is shot in a French cinema. This film is interesting in this context because it uses film as a means of revenge, depicting an alternate history.
Fifty years after WWII, the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina ended – an event that would collectively impact society in every way, including through film. Since the first post-war film, The Perfect Circle by Ademir Kenović, “war film” has developed in Bosnia and Herzegovina as a unique genre. The later success of No Man’s Land further solidified this established form, attracting domestic and international audiences and potentially bringing prestige through festival awards. However, practice reveals a different picture.
Fast forward nearly thirty years, and despite minimal output from Bosnia and Herzegovina’s film industry, this form has become tiresome for audiences, who, by their own admission, yearn for different content. The problem doesn’t seem to lie in the theme itself but in the way it’s presented. We’ve seen better-crafted war films, not only technically but also narratively. Some foreign films, through universal themes, even better capture the nature of human conflict, including the one that occurred in our region, than local filmmakers do. War as a theme, especially in feature films, has become a “crutch” or even a “wheelchair” for directors and screenwriters to lean on to fill narrative or formal gaps. In such films, characters are overly simplified, the world is presented in black-and-white, reduced to two roles – victim and executioner.
Documentary films, however, receive a different response. Viewership of documentaries at local festivals, especially attendance at the Dealing with the Past program at the Sarajevo Film Festival, shows that audiences are willing to watch and experience heavy topics. Here, parameters differ; in documentary films, technical or screenwriting elements matter less than the pursuit of truth in the events portrayed. Similar qualities can be present in feature films, as seen in the success of Quo vadis, Aida?, which is based on real events, blending a thriller plot with a mother’s race against time to try and save her family.
Art cannot change the world, but it can help a person change within. Through art, one can understand what it means to be human, come closer to their essence, and perhaps achieve some form of inner transformation. But to change the world? No, art cannot do that.[2]
Aware of all this, in 2019, I began working on a short autobiographical documentary film B4, which specifically reconstructs an event from my life – an injury during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The film features another key figure, a neighbor who carried me to the hospital that night, saving my life. We hadn’t met in the 26 years since that event.
I started working on the film after a long illness, which led me to revisit and relive the worst moment of my life. It wasn’t about “dealing with the past,” as the consequences of that event are still part of my daily life. Primarily, I wanted to document an event with a clear beginning, middle, and end. I made the film for personal reasons, “for myself,” without imagining a specific audience. The fact that it’s a short documentary, a form with a limited audience and popularity, gave me the freedom to experiment formally with the material, apart from documenting the meeting and verbal reconstruction.
The reactions were surprisingly positive. I didn’t expect such a response to a personal and, colloquially speaking, “heavy” story, especially after nearly 30 years of “war cinema.” I think the reason is that it’s an intimate story. It’s a personal narrative within a collective one, and the way it’s handled contains a level of authenticity the audience recognized as truthful. Not only the truth as fact but also that indescribable “truth” we often refer to when explaining why a work of art resonates. It opens a door to a space we might best describe as “truth.”
Far from considering the film I made a work of art or possessing absolute truth. I made it for deeply personal and selfish reasons, so that this event could be documented. Through its creation, I was able to, for a moment, offer the viewer something more than they expected or were accustomed to. The process of developing a culture of memory in a society includes film as a tool, and given modern history, films significantly contribute to this. Authors have a responsibility when addressing war themes, especially if they don’t want to fall into the service of propaganda or rehash overused topics.
Alen Šimić is a film director, born in Tuzla in 1988. He graduated from the Academy of Performing Arts in Sarajevo, where he studied under Pjer Žalica and Elmir Jukić. He has worked as a teaching assistant in Film Elements and the Development of Film Styles for three years. In the meantime, he directed five professional plays, three short films, and over thirty episodes of sitcoms. His documentary film B4 won Best Student Film in the Bosnia and Herzegovina selection at the Sarajevo Film Festival in 2020, and his short fiction film Witness premiered at last year’s Sarajevo Film Festival and was nominated for the “Heart of Sarajevo” in the Competition Short program.
[1] Bordwell, David. McGraw Education Ltd, 2009. p. 34.
[2] Tarkovsky, Andrei. Novi Sad: Akademska knjiga, 2018. p. 22.
