Told as personal testimony and recorded on smart phone, Bosnian director Jasenko Pašić’s To Freedom may present the terrifying experiences of one family during the War in the Balkans, but the director underlines that their story is a microcosm of the pain suffered by a whole generation of Muslims. As significantly, he believes his film is representative of the needless suffering experienced by all ethnicities during that bloody period. “Basically in this war in Bosnia, nobody won,” says the director.
The idea for the film came to Pašić, an actor as well as filmmaker, when he was on the set of Jasmila Žbanić’s Academy Award-nominated Quo Vadis Aida, about the Srebrenica massacre. His on-screen wife was played by Merima Lepić. “There was one day when we filmed in Heliodrom in Mostar, which used to be a concentration camp. We were sitting in our costumes and she just told me, ‘do you know that my dad was here in this camp?’…Filming one terrible event led to us talking about this other terrible event,” Pašić observes.
“That’s where the idea for To Freedom came from,” he continues. “I said, we need to make a film about this because you have a kid now and your father will die, and she will never know the whole story.”
Merima lived with her father Asim, mother Suvada and sister Almira in the small Bosnian city of Novi Šeher. The festival notes for the film stress that at the beginning of the war, Croats and Bosniaks fought together against Serbs, but the Croats betrayed the Bosniaks, and ethnically cleared the town. The family was subsequently torn asunder, the females going to the camp in Žepče, where they continually feared for their safety, while father Asim and Merima’s Uncle Nero were sent to the Heliodrom camp where they were in daily fear for their lives, they claim, treated as slaves and even saw some fellow prisoners opting to willingly have an arm broken rather than submit to the work regime.
The men were in the camp for six months, the women for one. When the family was finally united, most of Asim’s ribs were broken from constant beatings, we are told in the film, and he lost so much weight (he goes from 112kg to 68kg) that Merima did not recognize him. For the next two years, they were refugees, Merima observes. In total 30,000 people were incarcerated within the Bosnian camps during the conflict.
Director Pašić underlines that his approach is particular, as he tells the story in fractal, understated, more representational terms, rather than tackling the subject in an overt, in-your-face way. He admits to being “overwhelmed” by filmic approaches to the war that take an all-encompassing approach to the horror.
“1600 kids under the age of 13 died during the Sarajevo siege, right? So that’s a number, but I personally don’t really know what that number means,” he says. “So what I’m trying to do is tell the story of a single one of those kids, which then tells the story of all of those kids. That’s how I approach stuff. [In To Freedom] I told a story about a single family that went through what you’ve seen. So I made a film about all the people who were in that camp.”
In 2016 Pašić wrote Scream for Me Sarajevo, which focused on Iron Maiden lead man Bruce Dickinson’s decision in 1994 to play a gig in Sarajevo during the siege, the musicians who risked their lives to join him and the people who risked their lives to see them. “It is about the siege of Sarajevo but through music,” Pašić explains his approach to his subjects. “Basically, it’s a film about a rock concert, but at the same time it’s about the whole siege.”
Of To Freedom, the director further underlines how the film finally gives a voice to folk who have internalized past traumas for too long. “I have known Merima for some 15 years now, and I had never known that she was in the camp – and that’s weird. That’s not how things should be,” he says.
“Also she told me that her father never talks about what happened to him. That’s also weird. That means that he [was] living through the whole thing all over again, but inside of himself. That’s why I told her we need to put the story out. We need that story to be told for them, not for the audience that might come and buy popcorn and watch the film, but for them, her family,” observes Pašić of a process that eventually worked as a form of therapy.
“Of course, when I finished the first cut of the film, the first thing I did was to go to their place and show it to them. I didn’t want to make a film that they didn’t like – and they loved it. And her father said, now I don’t need to talk about this ever again, because now we have this film.”
