12/07/2006

Chilean-born director Patricio Guzman once said that "a country without documentaries is like a family without a photo album". This statement seems to perfectly suit Bosnia Diaries, Joaquim Sapinho's documentary about Bosnia's post-war period, which Lusomundo is releasing theatrically tomorrow.

After recent female perspectives on the Balkan wars - Isabel Coixet's The Secret Life of Words [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Isabel Coixet
film profile] (see focus) and Jamila Zbanic's Golden Bear winner Grbavica [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Barbara Albert
interview: Jasmila Zbanic
film profile] – Sapinho's latest film Bosnia Diaries opens a path towards a director's personal memories after his trips to Bosnia back in 1996 and 1998, where he filmed a country trying to heal its war wounds.

"This film is literally a photo album like a family album, but it has a different purpose from the albums where we only keep the beautiful pictures and the nice things that happened to us, simultaneously censuring everything else we would like to reject from our past. To me, it was as if I wanted to do an album with everything people wanted to forget", Sapinho told Cineuropa.

Yet shooting the legacy of the destruction of war and the possibility of reconstructing a country was not an easy task. The right tone had to be found: "I didn't want to play the judge, nor the cop, nor the historian… I was simply going to talk about what I had seen, trying to focus mainly on the small changes of perspectives rather than having an absolute or systematic approach about what had happened over there."

Built upon the refusal of an ordinary chorological structure, the documentary combines flashback images from both trips, with a narrative read by the director. The long editing process "was like a third trip in which I had to discover a country that wasn't Bosnia, but rather 'my' Bosnia. Consequently, the film is narrated in the first person and is called ‘Diaries’, explains the filmmaker.

Simultaneously, it successfully builds a bridge towards audiences' memories. "People also have their own memories, based on media images, on their minds. It's as if those two types of images might give people the opportunity to create their own images and edit them as if they would in a film, to create their own personal narrative", concludes the director.

Produced by Rosa Filmes, Bosnia Diaries is Sapinho's first documentary after two feature films, the acclaimed Corte de Cabelo (lit. "Haircut") in 1995 and The Policewoman in 2003.

In the meantime, casting for his upcoming project is already underway. It will be a coming-of-age tale about two teenager brothers trying, each one in their own way, to find their way in life.