the path ahead 

Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020) 
Directed by Jasmila Žbanić
Gore Capitalism Series #10 

I was too young and uninvolved to understand what was happening during the Bosnian War. And I was merely 7-years old when the Srebrenica massacre, as detailed in Jasmila Žbanić’s film, occurred. A cursory glance on Wikipedia gives me details but it’s etched in the past, something so horrifically intangible that it’s difficult to wrap my head around it. The petty concerns of the petulant assemble themselves for my day yet they all seem positively minute when compared to this kind of actual tragedy and injustice. Here, we observe people’s lives on the line, where their dependence on systems of safety are compromised, and the profound effort of a few that are willing to risk their own lives for the benefit of others. 

Žbanić’s film dramatizes the events leading up to the massacre, wherein the town of Srebrenica is evacuated into a small UN compound. The facility is profoundly inadequate for such an evacuation, with the looming threat that Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic (Boris Isakovic), along with his army, is expected to storm the site. But the story is told through Aida’s (Jasna Djuricic) perspective as a UN translator. As the UN Army fecklessly attempts to mobilize and negotiate with Mladic’s army, we see Aida exercise her minimal privilege to protect her husband and two young adult sons. It’s a pressure cooker as Aida is a subordinate tool to the UN, observing their incompetence while also at their mercy. When Mladic’s troops make it to the compound, they obliterate all convention, separating men and women in caravans before violently murdering the men. Akin to a film like Elem Klimov’s Come and See, what we observe is war at its most calculated and inhumane; an atrocity exhibition of ethnic cleansing. 

Within the scope of the Gore Capitalism series, Quo Vadis, Aida? is certainly the most conventional film, rooted in reality that diverges from the preceding films in Daniel R. Quiles’ programming. But when adopting Sayak Valencia’s perspective, you see the eerie similarities that unite the pictures. For one, Aida’s role as translator makes her a vital accessory in the function of military capitalism yet her resources provide little value when confronted with violence. She’s at the mercy of the larger, brutalist forces (two opposing forces that utilize violence as their means of aggression) and as a result finds herself losing everything. It’s akin to the varying social classes that were observed in Natalia López’ Robe of Gems or Ninja Thyberg’s Pleasure, insofar that the role women play in the larger infrastructure of capitalism is always subservient to violence, and ultimately, the purveyors of violence: men. It leaves women to observe the skeletons of the past, making sense of an anatomy of violence that has taken everything away from them.