Quo Vadis, Aida?

One of the five nominees for this year’s Best International Feature Film Academy Award, Jasmila Žbanić’s searing drama follows Aida (the utterly compelling Jasna Đuričić), a translator for the UN peacekeeping mission in and around Srebrenica in 1995, as she tries to shield her family from what she knows is coming: the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian-Muslims at the hands of (now convicted war criminal) General Ratko Mladic and his Serbian thugs. Director Žbanić—who won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for her debut ‘Grbavica’ in 2006—is a master at creating suspense and ratcheting up the tension as Aida scrambles to both do her job and provide sanctuary for her husband and two sons... ‘Astonishing… Đuričić’s performance is somehow both charismatic and self-effacing… There is relentless, dread-fuelled suspense here, and a kind of procedural efficiency that reminds me of Paul Greengrass’s fact-based films, like “Bloody Sunday” and “United 93.” The rigorous honesty of “Quo Vadis, Aida?” is harrowing, partly because it subverts many of the expectations that quietly attach themselves to movies about historical trauma…’—A.O. Scott, The New York Times