Lost in Translation

For someone who lived through it, the conflict in former Yugoslavia will always be the center around which she builds her cinema. Now Jasmila Žbanić, a Bosnian filmmaker, has decided to tackle one of the darkest chapters in recent European history: the Srebrenica massacre.
To approach such a delicate subject, Žbanić drew inspiration from a true story—altered in substance for narrative purposes—one capable of carrying deep metaphorical weight. Aida, the title character, is an interpreter for the Dutch United Nations troops tasked with protecting Srebrenica's safe zone, which Serbian militias invaded without hesitation. In the opening scene, Aida translates a meeting between the city's mayor and the Dutch soldiers who are supposed to defend it. The mayor doesn't believe the soldiers' words. The soldiers ignore the mayor's pleas. The meeting yields only empty words. Every word Aida translates is empty, weightless as air. The words of those representing the international community ring hollow. The Serbian militias speak words without honor. The Bosnians exchange words among themselves to gather strength. But Aida's work is to translate outright lies, to relay to others a world that doesn't exist—while the facts tell a different story entirely.
In civilian life, Aida was a teacher, but the culture she tried to instill produced nothing. In war, she becomes an interpreter, another futile task. Even when her words turn to screams, pleas, cries of anguish, translation fails. It is a war story told from a woman's perspective, directed by a woman capable of reconstructing a real event with elaborate, spectacular precision—weaving together facts from the historical record whose ending we already know, if only superficially, with the cinematic tension of invented drama. In this way, at least, the translation of a terrible true event into images has succeeded.