On the thirtieth anniversary of the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo, the documentary film “Hotel Sarajevo” by director Barbara Cupisti was released. The title is inspired by the Holiday Inn hotel, built for the 1984 Winter Olympics and which became a base for international journalists during the war. 

Thirty years ago, on April 5th, the war in the former Yugoslavia, which had been going on for a year, began. the siege of the city of Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which would have lasted 1425 days, the longest in modern history. For the occasion it was made by Clipper Media  , Luce Cinecittà and Rai Cinema the documentary “Hotel Sarajevo”, born from an idea by Andrea Di Consoli, directed by Barbara Cupisti, while the subject and screenplay are by the director herself, by Natascia Palmieri and by the writer, with the collaboration of Barbara Meleleo.

The preview of the film took place, in the presence of all those – producers, director, authors, actors, technicians – who contributed to its creation, on May 12 at the Casa del Cinema in Rome, awaiting its broadcast on May 29 on Speciale TG1 – Rai Uno in the late evening, at 23.30:XNUMX pm.

The title of the film is inspired by the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo, built for the 1984 Winter Olympics and which during the war became a base for journalists who came from all over the world to report on what was happening. Among them was the journalist Gigi Riva, then correspondent for The day, who in the evening at the Casa del Cinema gave his testimony on what life was like inside the structure, where Radovan Karadžić, ideologist of the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia Herzegovina, had also found a home for a certain time, who then took refuge in Bosnian-Serb territory from where he continued his campaign of death for which, at the end of the war, he was executed. sentenced to life as a war criminal.

The film, however, wanted to rise above the mere summary of facts to present itself as an opportunity for reflection on Sarajevo, and Bosnia Herzegovina in general, with the aim of understanding and making others understand how much of the martyr city of that time survives today in those who experienced it differently or, even, were not yet born at the time.

In this sense the documentary moves like a real film, whose plot is moved by the intertwining of some authentic characters who impersonate themselves: Zoran Herceg  , writer, author of graphic novels, artist who at the time was thirteen years old and who, after the first bombings, was loaded, with other children, boys and mothers, onto one of the 23 Red Cross couriers that would take them, refugees, abroad, seeking the meaning of all this today that he is 43 years old. The assessment is anything but comforting, not only because, apart from the bombs, the problems of his country are anything but resolved, indeed, they risk becoming more complicated at the sound of new nationalistic calls.

Another character from the film Slobodanka, called Boba, Lizdek, who during the war, at the age of twenty-six, worked as a fixer, going in and out of the hotel, bringing news and translating it from the local and national media for the journalists present, today the host of theHotel History Foundation, thanks to which he created an exhibition of the environments, events and characters of the time at the Sarajevo Historical Museum  . Not missing his love story  with the French reporter Paul Marchand, who will be wounded, and then meet a tragic end.

Zoran Herzog and Boba Lizdek are contrasted by the figures of, respectively, Almedina Vejzagic  , Zoran's wife, who was orphaned by her father, and Belmina Bajrovic  , currently executive manager of the Holiday Inn, which at the time had not yet been born and is today the same age as Boba was at the time.

The comparison, all resolved in a narrative key, of their stories, which intertwine in a dimension as evocative as it is strongly rooted in the present, does not neglect other moments that fit well into the context, thanks to a plot that follows the gripping writing and drawings of a graphic novel by Zoran through which various figures materialize: from Bakira Hasesić, one of the over twenty thousand women raped between 1992 and 1995, and who today fights with her association "The last installment  ” (Women Victims of War) for the recognition of their condition and the condemnation of the guilty; to Nihad Kreševljaković, director of theInternational Theater Festival MESS  , who achieved a fundamental video archive  of what he managed to collect about the war in his country, and others that, all together, thanks also to the masterly editing of the images, give back the flavour of a little-known land even if distant from us only the arm of the Adriatic Sea.

 Diego Zandel
Source: Observatory Balkans Caucasus Transeuropa – 27/05/2022