Sunday, April 18, 2021

Quo Vadis Aida (2020)

Nominated for Best International Feature    Hey, we're starting to get around to war atrocities committed during my lifetime.  Progress...?  

Aida (Jasna Djuricic) is a Serbo-Croatian translator for the U.N. during a crucial moment in the Bosnian war.  Her hometown of Srebrenica has been captured by a Serbian general (Boris Isakovic) and only a small number of the town's inhabitants can be safely housed within the U.N. camp.  Her husband and two sons are not among them.  Over the course of a desperate couple of days, Aida does everything she can to get her family safe harbor in the face of a looming genocide.

I don't remember a lot about the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Bosnian war because I was around ten-years-old but I remember it's what turned the U.N. into a joke.  A peacekeeping body that was so bureaucratic, it hamstrung itself and probably caused more damage than it helped.  That is on full display here, as is the horror of having to subsequently live next to the unpunished monsters.  You know I'm big on double features, and you could easily pair this with The Act of Killing.  It would be depressing as hell, but you could.

It's currently streaming on Hulu and my only real complaint is that there's no option for subtitles for the English parts and the closed captions actively obscure the subtitles for the Serbo-Croatian and Dutch parts.  I know it's probably because closed captioning is added as a secondary service later but it's really annoying because the English parts are super quiet and subtitles would very much have helped me.


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