The Fog of Srebrenica

What happens to you when you live in a society riven by civil war, when you’re forced to entertain the inconceivable thought that your neighbors are out to kill you? Hatidza, one of the mothers of Srebrenica, sums up this sense of disillusionment: “Because of what happened in World War II, we thought people must have been uncivilized back then. We thought civilization had progressed and that we understood each other now.” And the disillusionment was followed by fear. Survivors of the 1995 siege of Srebrenica talk about the events leading up to the mass murder of 8,372 Bosnian men. Women and children were carried off in buses, and along the way they saw “their” men, half-naked on a soccer field. One of the girls was the then-13-year-old Zinahida. She thought they were being driven to her deaths while the men played soccer. The Fog of Srebrenica presents interviews that are structured in chapters, each of which handles a new phase of this atrocity: the chaos and desperation, the starvation, the severely weakened Bosnian militias marching through the woods – a hellish ordeal that few survived. The sometimes-shocking images of the past drag up the horrors of a nightmare that just won’t end. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)