For Those Who Can Tell No Tales

A middle-aged Australian dancer, Kym, travels through Visegrad (in the Serbian part of Bosnia) and finds out afterwards that the sights she admired the hotel she stayed in were scenes of war crimes during the Bosnian War in the 1990ies. She then returns and becomes paranoid about everyone she meets, wondering what they had done during the war and if they might have been implied in the atrocities. The local police become wary of her snooping around and pressure her to leave. The film ends with her performing a kind of art installation at one of the crime sites, a hotel.

This would have been a much better film if Jasmila Zbanic would have emphasised the moral ambiguity of Kym, who is actually played by the Kym Vercoe who also wrote the script based on a performance which was also written by Kym Vercoe. I hope I got that right. Kym is a woman who is "haunted by the atrocities". Why? Her attitude towards the Bosnian War seems to be self-righteous, lofty and obsessive. Kind of like a Serbian traveling to Sidney to accuse white Australians of having stolen the land they are living on from the aborigines.

I didn't appreciate this film as much as Esma's Secret and Na Putu, in which Jasmila Zbanic shows her talent of narrating a complex story indirectly.