The devastating drama Quo Vadis, Aida? explores the run-up to the 1995 genocide. Actor Jasna Đuričić hopes the film will accelerate the healing process
In July 1995, the Serbian actor Jasna Đuričić was 29 and juggling a theatre career in Novi Sad with the demands of her new baby daughter. Just over 100 miles away in the UN-declared safe area of Srebrenica, more than 8,000 men and boys were being slaughtered by Bosnian Serb death squads, right under the noses of the Dutch military peacekeepers assigned to protect them. It was the culmination of a sustained and brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing.
“We didn’t know anything then about what was happening in Srebrenica,” Đuričić says. “It was around five years later that there were rumours emerging about the mass graves, but we were a country isolated from the media. Everything was state-controlled. You couldn’t hear or see anything outside what they wanted you to see.”
