Kumjana Novakova & Guillermo Carreras-Candi
Spain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia | 2021 | 72 min
Swiss Premiere
Languages : Bosnian, English
Subtitles : English, French
Nearly 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were massacred in Srebrenica in the summer of 1995. Kumjana Novakova and Guillermo Carreras-Candi have managed to get hold of archival footage that was shot at the time by the Serbian forces. Twenty years later, they confront these devastating images of the past with the current landscape of the former enclave, which still bears the scars of overwhelming collective grief.
A convoy slowly creeps across the asphalt. Coffins are offloaded from a lorry covered in flowers. A crowd gathers as a voice lists names. Srebrenica has been burying its dead since the summer of 1995, when nearly 8,000 Bosniak Muslims were massacred by the Bosnian Serbs, commanded by Ratko Mladic, who was sentenced to life imprisonment by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Kumjana Novakova and Guillermo Carreras-Candi have found videos from the time, filmed by Serbian operators, showing the fall of the “enclave”, which was supposed to be protected by UN peacekeepers. By comparing these staggering images with the reality of today, Disturbed Earth literally excavates the countryside that still bears the consequences of the genocide, from a sign warning of a minefield in the middle of a forest, to a mound of disturbed earth that could be a mass grave. Caption cards speak of indelible collective trauma, poignant internal voices living in a place of silence, in which the past seems to have captured the present.
Emmanuel Chicon
Guillermo Carreras-Candi
Disturbed Earth, 2021
When Clouds Burst, 2014
SK 2014, 2014
Tragovi, 2010
