Quo vadis, Aida?

Serbian actress and academic Jasna Đuričić gives the best performance of 2020 in Bosnian writer-director Jasmila Žbanić’s riveting historical wartime thriller Quo Vadis, Aida?  Đuričić stars as Aida Selmanagić, a middle-aged former schoolteacher working as a translator for United Nations forces during the end of the Bosnian war in 1995. At this point in the long conflict, the UN declared Srebrenica a safe haven, and thousands of Muslim civilians sought refuge at a base controlled by Dutch UN peacekeepers. In her role as a translator, Aida quickly realizes the UN soldiers are not going to provide the kind of protection she and her people require. When Gen. Ratko Mladic (Boris Isaković), commander of the Bosnian Serb army, is granted entry to the compound, Aida knows there is little chance her husband and sons will survive. Thus, even though the outcome seems inevitable, the film is loaded with gripping tension as Aida frantically tries to save her family and get the UN soldiers to provide the protection they promised.

Đuričić endows Aida with strength, tenacity, and genuine charisma while never letting go of the palpable sense of terror and helplessness she feels at practically every moment of the film. Empowered by her intelligence and skillset, yet overwhelmed by her circumstances, Aida attempts to leverage the fact that she has been useful to the UN and that Mladic’s swaggering forces, who enjoy wielding their power over the hapless peacekeepers, are in no particular hurry to execute their brutal brand of ethnic hate. But her valiant attempts to escape and to provide safe passage to her family members only emphasize the futility of the situation.

The narrative beats can be tracked via Đuričić’s face, which carries the weight of each setback Aida experiences. This powerfully subtle and often silent performance provides the majority of the tension at the heart of an intense nail-biter in which very little action actually occurs. Žbanić’s screenplay unfolds like a procedural about institutional failure, tracking how bureaucratic forces whose job is to protect and keep the peace slowly become complicit in one of the biggest war crimes of the post-WWII era.

Žbanić’s mildly fictionalized dramatization of all-too real-life events told in granular, dread-fueled, ticking-clock style recalls movies like Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (2006), Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005) and Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda (2004). But Quo Vadis, Aida? bests all those pictures to become one of the most powerful wartime thrillers of the past twenty years because it subverts most of our expectations. This is not a redemption story, nor is it a tale of heroic resistance in the face of a historical nightmare. It focuses instead on one relatively minor character’s harrowing personal experience of genocide.