Bosnians Again Shooting --With Cameras, That Is

Every day here in the Bosnian capital, people make simple testimonies to faith in the country’s uncertain peace.

They ride in trolley cars, even though some passengers were killed as recently as last month. They stroll along the city’s main thoroughfares, even though sniper fire sometimes still rings out. They gawk at expensive display windows, even though most can barely afford basic groceries.

And during the past few days, a group began filming Bosnia-Herzegovina’s first postwar movie, even though no one knows for sure what Sarajevo will be like during the three months that will be needed for production.

“We just want to live normally. This is not for us only a film--it is life,” said director Ademir Kenovic. “If we are not able to make this film, then the [peace] agreement is not functioning. Then next week the bakery won’t be working either.”

During the war, filmmaking in Sarajevo was mostly real-life storytelling, a gritty collection of documentaries that recorded the agony of a besieged people. Many artists went into exile.

But Kenovic, among others, dodged bullets and quelled insufferable heartache--his mother was killed in Sarajevo when a shell struck her home--to chronicle the human toll of a war that the world was bent on ignoring.

Now Kenovic and his collaborators have become the first filmmakers to revive the art of feature production.

“It will be the restart of Bosnian cinematography,” said Pjer Zalica, co-writer of the screenplay. “At the very beginning of the war, we were confused. In the middle, we were angry. Now, at the end, we have the right frame of mind to say something in a film.”

Their undertaking, “Perfect Circle,” has a tragic wartime theme. But unlike the recent documentaries, it uses pyrotechnic explosions, not real bombs, and professional actors, not unlucky victims of war.

Like the crowded trolleys, streets and shops, a movie shoot in Sarajevo perhaps says more about the determination of this rebounding city than untold pronouncements from diplomats and politicians.

“I used to think intensively how Sarajevo was going to receive me and how I was going to find Sarajevo,” said Mustafa Nadarevic, an actor who lives in Zagreb, Croatia, and plays the lead role. “I can tell you I am the happiest I have been in my acting life. I found Sarajevo this time the prettiest of all times.”

Shooting on “Perfect Circle” recently took place in Old Sarajevo, just up the road from the bridge where the 1914 assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand set off World War I. The scene being filmed was set on Christmas Eve 1993, and the backdrop was a lone chimney surrounded by the snow-swept rubble of a collapsed building. A few props were needed, but the war had already supplied most everything.

Hamza, a suicidal poet played by Nadarevic, was showing two young refugee boys a string of Christmas lights dangling from a nearby U.N. bunker, where French peacekeepers were celebrating the holiday. The Muslim boys not only knew nothing about the birth of Jesus Christ; they had never seen electric lights in a city long darkened by war.

In the screenplay, the bond he forms with the orphans, ages 6 and 10, gives the despondent poet new hope. His family has fled Sarajevo; the boys gradually fill the void. His death wish gives way to a will to survive, though his world is again shattered when one of the boys is gunned down trying to flee the city.

The loss renders Hamza permanently speechless, yet he and the remaining boy carry on. Hamza never writes the poem on suicide that he had been tossing about in his head at the start of the film.

“It took us three years to finish the script, to talk about the subject calmly,” said Zalica, who is also assistant director. “Our problem was the situation was so hot. It was like living in a volcano. It is very difficult to say something about fire when you are in the volcano.”

The $3-million movie is being made by SAGA, a group of Sarajevo filmmakers, but funding is coming from many sources, including the European Union, the Bosnian and Croatian governments and a German television station. Kenovic said he is still short about $500,000.

On a snowy night, with temperatures in the teens, the director’s thoughts were not on his budget. Barbed wire sparkled in blinding lights as cast and crew paced to stay warm. Kenovic stood on a wooden stool waving a red hat, flagging one of the freezing young actors to keep his eye toward the camera. By the 18th take, just as things were going right, the imam at a nearby mosque began chanting a prayer so loudly that the cameras had to be idled.

Meanwhile, a stream of children filed past the gate asking about acting jobs. The movie is big news in Sarajevo, largely because the local media advised still-edgy residents not to be alarmed by the sound of gunfire and shelling. This time, it would be make-believe.

Kenovic says his camera carries no political lens, and he insists that the film, although about life and death at Bosnian Serb gunpoint, will be entertainment, not an indictment of the Serbs. In one scene, he points out, the boys learn about good and bad Serbs, with the poet illustrating the difference by drawing an analogy to Germans and Nazis.

“A city is made of its people,” said Nadarevic. “This terrible evil was experienced by all the nations, all the people here. What was done by the criminal in fact made the victim richer. In the victim, this criminal developed goodness and tenderness.”

The actor said that his only regret about the film is that it was not made earlier, when death was raining on Sarajevo from the hills above. The movie’s message, he said, could have been the city’s most powerful reply.