Igor Drljaca's film The White Fortress is the first co-production between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Canada.Courtesy of Timelapse Pictures
Igor Drljaca is the writer-director of The White Fortress, which is now available in theatres and digitally across Canada, and in select Landmark cinemas starting March 28
I have watched the war raging in Ukraine with dismay and sadness. It has forced me to confront some of the darker chapters of my youth in Sarajevo, and has made me re-evaluate why my latest film, The White Fortress – the first co-production between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Canada – is relevant to today’s audiences.
Set in today’s Sarajevo, The White Fortress follows a teenage orphan, Faruk, who forages for scrap metal with his uncle while doing odd jobs for a local mob boss. In a chance encounter, he meets Mona, an affluent girl struggling to find meaning and love in a space that remains inhospitable to young people and their dreams.
I was born in Sarajevo, in 1983, to a Bosniak mother and a Serbian father – a fairly common “mixed marriage” at the time, and a reminder that ethnic tensions in the country were not a constant before the Bosnian civil war and the breakup of Yugoslavia. We lived in an apartment in the neighbourhood of Dobrinja, our balcony facing the Sarajevo Airport.
The war arrived the first week of April, 1992. I still remember my dad reminding us that “this will last three weeks, tops.” A curfew was already in place, and the electricity went off intermittently. Leaving the neighbourhood could be deadly. We began to spend some evenings in a shared first-floor storage unit, sheltering with our neighbours. The walls were thick, and they helped to drown out the air-raid sirens.
After several “storage nights,” where faint music, card games and an occasional Ouija session became the norm, my mother became increasingly unnerved. She was a civil engineer and was able to calculate how effective the concrete structure would be against different tank and artillery shells. She determined that we were safer in our apartments, because the storage unit faced artillery positions.
As April was coming to an end, one incident changed everything. A large Yugoslav Army convoy passed us. The soldiers were leaving the newly independent state of Bosnia-Herzegovina, some of them waving the three-finger Serbian salute. Knowing this to be a nationalist salute, I waved back – with an outstretched middle finger. A lone armoured transporter moved slower than the others. Something was not right. Soon it got stuck in a ditch in front of our building. Its tracks had fallen off. Inside, the panicked soldiers aimed their gun turret at a nearby building, then at our building, reminding the curious to stay away. They waited and waited for rescue, but no one came.
A tense standoff with a local territorial force ensued. The soldiers negotiated surrender and were taken prisoner. Later that day we learned that they had been executed. The adults feared what would come next.
That night, the Yugoslav and Serb Republic armies shelled our neighbourhood, striking a half-dozen apartments. In turn, members of the Bosnian territorial forces began using recently abandoned apartments as their bases of operation. The next day, a small military convoy retrieved the Yugoslav transporter and added it to the forces of the separatist Serb Republic, which was fortifying a siege of the city that would last for the next three and a half years.
My dad, the eternal optimist, kept trying to bend reality, whispering, “three, maybe four weeks, tops,” while my mother planned to get us out. A few days later, my mother, brother and I became refugees. A week after we left Sarajevo, our block became the front line of the war. It was reduced to nothing more than a patchwork of destroyed rooms – the same rooms that a few days earlier hosted loud birthday parties, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles marathons, and Sunday morning crepes with Eurocrem. Today almost no one from that building lives in Bosnia.
In those first few weeks of war in Sarajevo, there was a sense that things might be able to go back to normal if cooler heads prevailed. After years of fighting, Bosnia-Herzegovina emerged from the war not as a strong and unified country, but as a weak and polarized one. Even today, the politics of ethnic rivalry continue, as Serbia and Croatia, signatories of the Dayton Peace Accords, undermine meaningful reform. Meanwhile, the fatigued and half-hearted engagement of the U.S. and the EU has allowed Russia’s escalatory rhetoric to destabilize politics in the country.
Out of the 4.5 million people who lived in Bosnia-Herzegovina, two million were displaced by the war and more than 100,000 died. Almost a million never returned. Bosnia’s negative population growth will shrink its size to just over two million in the next two decades. More than 50,000 people emigrate every year.
The continued escalation of Bosnia’s war did not bring about a better peace treaty for its people. There is a myth that you are made stronger by war, as if it is some kind of character test. I remember some peers in Canada being envious of my experience, and I always wondered: “Who the hell would be envious of war?”
I made The White Fortress in the hopes of defining one postwar space and telling a story about what it is like for young people living in Sarajevo today. I now suspect my film is also about what might lie ahead for Ukraine’s populace. The events there have brought into focus just what was lost in Bosnia-Herzegovina after its prolonged war. One can fix the facades of buildings more easily than one can rebuild communities, especially when so many people are displaced.
Once communities are severely depopulated by a prolonged war, the transition period can become permanent. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the loss of people has created irreparable damage to the country’s social fabric. Today’s Bosnian youth are leaving because it ultimately took too long to find the peace. I fear the same will occur in Ukraine.
Special to The Globe and Mail
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