A father’s last recordings before genocide

Chiara Sambuchi did not intentionally set out to make a documentary about the Bosnian War (1992-1995). “But this intimate story about a daughter looking for her father was hard to ignore,” the 51-year-old Italian documentarian explained from her home in Berlin. Sambuchi first heard about it via Jaap Verdenius. A few years ago, the Dutch journalist stumbled upon a collection of old VHS tapes in second-hand shop in Belgrade. “Initially, Jaap couldn’t understand the content of those tapes,” Sambuchi explained. “But he became fascinated by this man behind the camera, talking to his daughter. With the help of a translator, Jaap was able to piece together a basic outline of this tragic family story.”

That original footage ran to four hours and three minutes. It begins in 1991, in the town of Srebrenica, in eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina – then still part of Yugoslavia. In the opening shot, an eight-year-old girl, Alisa Smajlović, stands in her backyard, seemingly carefree and happy. She has received a birthday gift from her father, Sejfo. “You put the toy together,” she tells Dad with heartfelt gratitude. In the following scene, Sejfo addresses the camera directly. But the mood has darkened. He looks hopeless and helpless. “Alisa,” he says. “I got a camera. I’ve captured lots of material from the war. But I’ve also filmed around the house, the old neighbours, the refugees. To show you how it is now. Don’t worry. We will see each other soon. Don’t ever forget your father.”

Common path

The film then abruptly cuts to a static shot, where grainy black and white dots fill the screen. “When Jaap finished watching this tape, he travelled to Srebrenica and found a way to get in contact with Alisa,” said Sambuchi. “After that, he called Antje Boehmert, my executive producer, who asked me if I was interested in working on Alisia’s story.”

Initially, Sambuchi was sceptical. “I don’t speak Bosnian and I’m not familiar with Bosnian culture or the Balkan region more generally, so I didn’t think I was the right person to make this,” she admitted. “I do, however, remember the Bosnian War. I grew up in Pesaro, Italy, on the Adriatic Coast. When I was a teenager, students from Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia came to my high school as refugees.”

For the last 25 years Sambuchi has directed many documentaries about vulnerable individuals on the move. The Deal (2022) featured a Nigerian woman rescuing victims of human trafficking in Italy. Lost Children (2017) told the story of ten thousand children who vanished crossing Europe's borders during the 2014-15 refugee crisis. Sambuchi has filmed in post-conflict Uganda and rural Rwanda too. “Typically, the documentaries I tend to make are intimate stories, and many are about women,” she explained. “Before agreeing to make this documentary, though, I wanted to meet with Alisa to find a common path between us.”

Today, Alisa is in her early 40s and lives in the US state of Florida and has a teenage daughter. She first met with Sambuchi while holidaying in northern Italy. The setting was relaxed and informal. They got to know each other by walking and talking in nature. “Alisa and I spent three days together in Italy,” said Sambuchi. “After that, I had the feeling that the project might work because we had such a strong connection.”

Communicating their respective creative ideas in Italian also helped. “It is, of course, my mother tongue. And Alisa is married to an Italian man, so she speaks the language fluently,” the documentary filmmaker explained. “During that first meet-up I remember we both spoke about a feeling of nostalgia you have when you are far away from your hometown.”

Alisa no longer considers Srebrenica home. She left it a lifetime ago. The Srebrenica Tape – From Dad, for Alisa explores why she departed the small mountainous town and never returned. “Back then, my dad filmed all the time, especially me,” Alisa tells us in the documentary’s opening scene. “My Mum is Serbian. My Dad is Bosnian. It was a carefree time, before it all started, until Yugoslavia collapsed.”

That poignant voiceover is accompanied by shots of Alisa as a child dancing and having fun with friends and family at home. Sambuchi’s documentary presents an edited version of Seifo’s original tape, with added footage from the present day. Alisa still has many questions. To find answers, she travels from her home in the US, back to Serbia and Bosnia, where she meets up with some of Seifo’s old friends, and her own close family relatives, including her half-sister.

Too painful to process

Sambuchi also possesses an advantage that Seifo did not have at his disposal when he originally made the tape: the hindsight of history. In one scene, a car drives on a country road at night. Over the radio we hear the voice of Marinko Sekulić Kokeza: “At the beginning of 1991 the secret arming begun,” the Bosnian journalist explains. “Yugoslavia had been broken into six countries. In that new system the nationalists took power. The echoes of the war got closer and louder by the day.”

In early 1993 Srebrenica had been declared a UN Safe Zone. By July 1995, however, the town had fallen to the Bosnian Serb army, led by General Ratko Mladić. His troops murdered 8,000 Muslim men in a few days. Mladić had been given orders to eliminate the Muslim population from Srebrenica and the town’s surrounding enclaves by Radovan Karadžić – president and supreme commander of the armed forces of the self-proclaimed entity Republika Srpska. Both men are still serving prison sentences. Their crimes were declared a genocide by The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals. 

Alisa left Srebrenica before those events unfolded. Prior to the outbreak of war, she was brought to her grandparents’ home in Ljubovija, Serbia. Meanwhile, Seifo and his wife, Dana, both returned to Srebrenica. Their marriage was then falling apart. Seifo believed he could rescue their relationship by following his wife back home. Alisa, we learn, is discovering many of the details of her complex family history, decades later, for the very first time. “Nobody explained anything to me,” she tells her mother in one emotive interview.

But Dana had her reasons for keeping quiet. Her memories from that time were too painful to process. Following the fall of Srebrenica, she joined thousands of people who attempted to escape through forests and fields to the free territory of Tuzla, one hundred kilometres away. This journey has since become known as “The Death March”. It began on July 11th 1995, when Mladić took control of Srebrenica. Dana walked through the forest for 17 days. She was accompanied with a small boy from the locality, Bego.

Today, he is a middle-aged man. With Alisa and Dana, Bego recreates the walk and shares traumatic details. He and Dana survived on food from the backpacks of murdered Bosniaks. They also drank water from streams contaminated with the blood of fresh corpses. Eventually, Bego and Dana managed to make it to Tuzla alive.

Pornography of pain

Sambuchi said it was important to give Dana, and the other women who feature in the documentary space to express their stories. “In most narratives about wars, women don’t get enough space,” she said. “The narrative is typically about the war itself. But never about the survivors, or about the women who fight. Granted, these women may not always fight on the front lines, but they fight from another position.”

“Women in the Bosnian War were, of course, victims” Sambuchi added. “That is not up for question. But women were very strong protagonists too and I felt it was important to focus on that.” 

Sambuchi’s documentary also features footage from the Bosnian War. Most of it was filmed by western journalists. In one scene we see ethnic cleansing in real time: Bosniak men and women of Srebrenica are separated and driven away in buses. In another, the camera pans to Ratko Mladić posing inside an army tank, wearing sunglasses and smoking a cigarette. During the Srebrenica genocide, the notorious Scorpions unit, a Serb paramilitary unit active during the Yugoslav Wars, filmed a limited number of the killings. That footage shows young Bosniak teenagers with their wrists bound by ligatures and blindfolded, prior to being shot by the Serb militants. This footage was later presented as evidence at the international tribunal. It also features in many other documentaries that have been made about the Srebrenica genocide.

“Initially, I wanted to show this archive footage,” Sambuchi said. “We are, after all, talking about a genocide. But Alisa was against it. She said: yes, for you as a journalist, I see your point of view. But think about me, and all the relatives of the victims.”

This conversation touched Sambuchi in a profound way. “It made me realize the pain this footage could cause to some of my audience,” she explained. “Eventually, I chose not to show it. When I toured the film at various festivals, many people thanked me for not showing the footage. As filmmakers, we don’t need to show everything.”

Sambuchi believes documentary filmmakers need to respect victims’ boundaries when detailing the traumatic events they have suffered. “I call this the pornography of pain,” she said. “We need to be careful as filmmakers about this. Through Alisa’s feedback I realized that I was abusing the footage. I was so focused on an idea of [justice] that I didn’t think about the pain showing the footage might cause to some of my audience.”

A conversation

Seifo was killed in the Bosnian War. Sambuchi’s documentary contains some allusions to the details. But they are subtle. The director doesn’t focus on where and when it happened. Directing the documentary film was a “huge honour” said Sambuchi: “During the three years it took me to make it, I often asked myself: how Seifo would approach this scene? I was also aware that I was using footage from a filmmaker who has since died, and I felt I had to stay true to the film’s original idea and aesthetic.”

Fundamentally, it’s a conversation - through the medium of film – between a father and his daughter. The chaos of war separated them forever. Some of the scenes are heartbreaking to watch. From Srebrenica, Seifo speaks about witnessing “constant bombs, grenade attacks, and attacks from the air”.

He also remembers his last ever encounter with Alisa. “I was back in Ljubovija,” Seifo concludes, looking directly into the camera, fighting back tears. “I decided to leave because I had to. They would have killed me, had I stayed. You were sleeping Alisa. I didn’t want to wake you. I bent over, gave you a kiss, and left. I went home to Srebrenica. I went to our garden, lied down … I smelled the grass. And I knew that I had come home.”

JP O’ Malley is a freelance journalist and critic. In addition to his regular contributions to New Eastern Europe, his work appears regularly in publications such as the Sunday Independent, Ireland, The New European, The Age, and Index on Censorship.