THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – NOT TO BE MISSED
A high-floor apartment in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. In front of the window, a group of young people, off-camera, comment on the shots falling on the building opposite. One of them holds the camera and records everything. “Don’t stay in the frame”a friend tells him, as the bombings intensify. These images were filmed in the spring of 1992, by Nedim Alikadic, when the Sarajevians discovered, dismayed, the situation: their city was shelled by the Serbs and they could no longer escape (at least initially). The siege would last four years (until February 29, 1996).
This video is one of the documents unearthed by Jean-Gabriel Périot in his new feature film. Remember a city reactivates the memory of the siege of Sarajevo, with films shot at the time by amateurs or film students. Born in 1974, the documentarian has the Art of revisiting archives and shedding new light on them. His prolific work embraces political struggles – The Delicate Art of the Matraque (2009), The Devil (2012), A German youth (2015), Our defeats (2019) –, but also social, intimate, such Return to Reims (Fragments), (2021), César for best documentary.
Time travel
Divided into two acts, Remember a city is not afraid to get confused during the first half hour, before installing a precise device. The strength of the film is its great originality and its documentary rigor. The first part delivers without commentary various archives filmed during the blockade: reports for television or the army, praising the courage of these young Bosnians who had improvised as soldiers; a logbook, kept by a boy, the son of a surgeon, who helped out at the hospital and found himself wrapping an amputated leg in a bag; but also festive videos during an improvised screening… Let us remember that the Sarajevo Film Festival was born in 1995, as a gesture of survival, after several wild editions.
In the second part, Périot interviews successively with the filmers (five in total) in Sarajevo: the meetings take place in a neighborhood chosen by each of them – notably in Dobrinja, very affected by the war. Then each author, in turn, rediscovers their own archives on a tablet. The camera goes so far as to capture the reflection of Nedim Alikadic’s face on the screen, while the fifty-year-old watches his teenage videos.
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