Adocumentary about how media revealed the corruption plaguing Romania’s healthcare system and a Bosnian woman’s story about the Srebrenica genocide have been shortlisted for best international feature film at the 2021 Oscars.
Two stories from the Balkans, told by a Romanian-born man and a Bosnian woman have been put on a shortlist of 15 films in the Best International Feature category for the upcoming Oscars, the US Academy Awards said in a statement on Tuesday evening.
‘Collective’, a documentary by German-Romanian director Alexander Nanau, was also put on the shortlist in the Best Feature Documentary category.
It traces a journalistic exposé unravelling the systemic corruption in Romanian hospitals in the wake of the fire at the Colectiv nightclub in Bucharest in 2015.
The blaze caused the deaths of 65 concert-goers and revealed major shortcomings in the country’s public healthcare system.
Bosnian film-maker Jasmila Zbanic’s drama ‘Quo Vadis Aida?’ tells the story of a young Bosnian woman working as a translator for UN peacekeeping troops as Bosnian Serb forces seized Srebrenica in July 1995, and trying to save her family from the impending massacres.
Both films have been widely praised by critics. ‘Collective’, which also depicts the wave of indignation in Romania caused by the deaths of some of the blaze survivors who were subsequently infected in hospitals, has been commended for its brutal honesty.
Its director made headlines in January when he refused to be decorated by Romanian President Klaus Iohannis, over the lack of support from the state to artists during the current pandemic crisis.
“So, it would be very wrong, from my side, to go and let them pin a medal on my chest, effectively saying that, ‘Actually, Romanian culture is doing fine’,” Nanau told US magazine Variety.
Meanwhile Bosnian director Zbanic told US publication The Wrap in January that she wanted to tell the story of what happened in Srebrenica “through a female perspective”.
The nomination was welcomed in her home country as a chance to further raise awareness about the 1995 Srebrenica massacres, in which more than 7,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb forces – a crime that has been classified as genocide by international courts.
Emir Suljagic, director of the Srebrenica Memorial Centre, told BIRN that the Oscar nomination is important because more than 25 years have passed since the genocide and many people around the world still do not know about it.
“This film has the potential to correct this injustice; of course it will not solve the absence of academic research that we have not really had for the last 25 years, it will not solve many other things, but at the level of popular culture, this is a film that acts as our messenger,” said Suljagic.
Izudin Bjarovic, one of the actors in the film, told BIRN that it was vital to keep talking about the genocide because some people still deny that it happened.
“It is infinitely important from the point of view of documenting it [the genocide] for the film to be seen, for as many people as possible to see it all over the world,” said Bajrovic.
The shortlist for the Best International Feature category excluded Serbia’s entry, ‘Dara of Jasenovac’, about a Serb child who fights for her and her little brother’s survival in the WWII-era Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia.
The film became the subject of controversy when the director threatened to sue the Los Angeles Times because its review of ‘Dara of Jasenovac’ allegedly denied “the genocide committed against Serbs during World War II” by the Nazi-allied Croatian WWII regime.
The Los Angeles Times review alleged that the “veneer of historical reality is thin” in the film and that its Serbian director was trying to score political points amid a “longstanding regional feud” between Serbs and Croats.
Link : https://balkaninsight.com/2021/02/10/romanian-corruption-film-srebrenica-drama-shortlisted-for-oscars/
لنستخرج كنوزا من المعرفة و الإبداع و العلم و الأفكار
