SARAJEVO: STORIES OF A SIEGE
Documentaries by Giancarlo Bocchi
L’assedio – Mille giorni a Sarajevo, Italy/Bosnia, 1994-2015, 45′
Il ponte di Sarajevo, Italy/Bosnia, 1995-2015, 90’
Gente di Sarajevo, Italy,/Bosnia 1994-2015, 60’
The siege of Sarajevo has shown that the human being always overcomes war.
A lot has been written and said regarding a siege and a conflict that for many reasons remains shrouded in mystery, and that many believe were the first sparks of the current war between radical Islam and the Western world.
Little has been said about the extraordinary people of a city, an abandoned European capital, who stood up and fought for their fundamental human rights and, thus, also for our rights. Exiled from the world and victims of the massacres, grenades, snipers, of hunger, of thirst, of external enemies and also internal ones, the people of Sarajevo during four years – but they could resisted even eight, twelve years or for ever -have demonstrated to the world with patience and fatalism that the people of a country can not be defeated by weapons.
Even if there is no monument to honor their extraordinary civil resistance, the people of Sarajevo are still there to show- those who are there, and even those who are gone- that it is them who have won. In the four documentaries that I shot in the besieged city and in my feature film Nemaproblema, I tried, with many fragments connected by a common human thread, to express the complex reality of a great tragedy. A tragedy that can be considered the greatest and symbolically most important of the end of the twentieth century.
Today, the war in Bosnia and the siege of Sarajevo seem like events of the past, overtaken by even more cruel and devastating realities such as those in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.
In fact, Bosnia remains an open wound in Europe, an entity more bureaucratic than political, dominated by blindness and financial interests, shaken by a thousand problems and unable to solve even one. It is also for this reason that the open wound of Bosnia is a serious matter that may yet trigger more unpredictable events, as has already happened during the twentieth century.
According to the UN, during the past twenty years, Bosnia has become one of the twenty poorest countries in the world. There are almost 7,000 war criminals who have not yet been indicted or arrested and there are still 2500 investigations frozen in courts. The country is dominated by the political parties of the men who caused the conflict and by rackets. Like a volcano is ready to erupt with an increasing number of jihadist attacks every day.
Over the past twenty years, many trains have arrived in Sarajevo station. But the one that the people of Sarajevo were waiting for during the siege, the one of true peace, has not yet arrived.
