Himself
Himself
Himself
Himself
A hotel in the centre of town is a war-time home and refuge for many of Sarajevo's homeless people. Every morning they leave the hotel and wander around the destroyed city gathering again at the defunct hotel in the afternoon. This film follows their separate fates through the bitter comparing of images of the bums with those of dogs abandoned by their owners and now left et the mercy of the war ravaged streets of Sarajevo.
The carnage in Sarajevo provides the focus of this French documentary which seeks to call attention to the terrible conflict in the hopes of finally ending it. The film is divided into five parts. Each part covers a time frame ranging from April 4, 1992, the beginning of the war, to the present. The major issues that occur are three-fold. It depicts the systematic genocide of Bosnians, the silence of Western countries, and the determination of the Bosnians to resist. They refuse to be seen as victims, even though the filmmakers portray them so. Also included are the origins and political aspects of the war. It offers interviews with participants. It also reveals how the U.S. State Department censored reports about Serbian death camps.

Between 1993 and 1995, artist and photographer Louis Jammes took pictures of people on the streets of Sarajevo under siege and gave them angelic face and wings. Then he put his huge portraits on destroyed city walls. Suddenly, it seems as life is getting back with their arrival, because they brought a sense of peace, beauty, nostalgia...

I went to Bosnia after war ended, in 1996, when the Danton Peace Accord was being implemented. Bosnia had been divided in two entities, which separated the two main opposing forces of the conflict; the Serb Bosnians and the Muslim Bosnians. Two years later, in 1998, I returned to Bosnia... This movie is a diary of the two voyages, in which I deal with the memories of the war, the death and destruction and with the victim’s struggle who don’t know how to return home.
Nearly 20 years since the end of the 1992-95 Bosnian war, there are people who still live in refugee Centers, usually located on the outskirts of cities and villages. In such centers what should have been temporary has become indefinite. Collecting medicinal herbs or scraps from nearby coal mines and raising children who were born as refugees in their own country are just some aspects of the monotonous daily life of the people in Ježevci.

Hamdija Šahinpašić (1914-2003) was one of those rare individuals able to memorize songs in their authentic traditional form. Šahinpašić belonged to a family known for its songs. In the early 1950's, Miodrag A. Vasiljević recorded Šahinpašić singing dozen of songs at the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences in Belgrade. A 1967 publication finally included 300 of his songs, published bilingually in Bosnian and Russian. Šahinpašić himself become the focus of attention of numerous ethnomusicologists and folklorists and his repertoire was preserved on recording of good quality.