Why Quo Vadis, Aida? deserves an Oscar

Jasmila Žbanić’s masterful film asks us to open our eyes, speak up and act to save lives.

Quo Vadis, Aida?, Jasmila Žbanić’s gut-wrenching film about the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica, the end-game of the Bosnian war, is this year’s Bosnian entry for the foreign feature category of the Academy Awards. Directed by Žbanić and produced by her small independent company Deblokada, the film is set to compete against the film industry’s favourite – Another Round, a Danish comedy-drama about male bonding, mid-life crisis, and binge-drinking. The contrast between the worlds that the two films inhabit and represent could not be greater. In the eyes of those of us who have lived through the horrors of the Bosnian war, Quo Vadis, Aida? is a masterpiece that truly deserves an Oscar. It is an intimate film about the mass-scale political violence that took place in Srebrenica, where 8,372 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed in what has come to be known as “Europe’s only post-World War II genocide”. What distinguishes genocide from a massacre or a mass shooting, even of a large number of victims, is that it is a premeditated, planned and systematically executed act of violence against a target population.