“Cultures of History Forum”: Representing Trauma – Writing the Past Into the Present Through Films
21. Apr 2022
Nevena Daković
The two films that highlighted Balkan production in 2020 were Dara of Jasenovac (Predrag Gaga Antonijević, 2020, Serbia) and Quo vadis, Aida? (Jasmila Žbanić, 2020, Bosnia and Herzegovina). In distinctive, yet similar ways, both films explore the relationship between film narratives and historical events, while the public’s response to both films was largely determined by broadly established social, historical and political debates. Critical reception in Serbia and beyond was less about the films’ narratives and more about the traumatic history they both revived. General criticisms of both films were concerned with the echoes of the shattering past in the present political context and with the portrayal of ‘the Other’ as clearly ‘ethnic’ perpetrators. Having started even before the films premiered, many of the polemics that were published about them, indeed, had an adverse effect thereby making it difficult for the films to be viewed objectively, without the national(ist) historical, identity, traumatic memory, revisionist and far-right accretions they had already accumulated. A few critical reviews made minimal reference to the film’s social context; they were usually rather negative about Dara while they often praised Aida.
https://www.cultures-of-history.uni-jena.de/serbia/representing-trauma-through-films
Nevena Daković: Representing Trauma – Writing the Past Into the Present Through Films. Cultures of History Forum (21.04.2022), DOI: 10.25626/0136