LES VIVANTS ET LES MORTS DE SARAJEVO (SARAJEVO: THE LIVING AND THE DEAD)

Alone in the winter of Sarajevo. This is an intimate portrait of the daily lives of people in a devastated city. Focusing on a few individuals, it reflects the horror and the sadness of the collective destiny of an entire population. The inhabitants, prisoners of the besieged city, attempt to live normally in an abnormal situation. They are proud of every single day they manage to stay alive. In a city deprived of everything, cut off from the world, where the search for bread, water and wood involves mortal risks, where shells are deliberately aimed at civilians, where snipers wreak devastation, every new day is a victory over death.

In October 1992, Yugoslavian-born filmmaker Radovan Tadić left his home in Paris and returned to the Bosnian capital for the first time in 20 years. In January 1993, he went back again for a few months. His aim was not to inform the audience about the reasons for the war but much more to understand for himself how this could happen and to show the atmosphere of death and despair, the hopelessness of life in the conditional. His heart is not filled with hatred, just disbelief and astonishment when witnessing the incomprehensible and absurd destruction of a European metropole.

"Everything there is a paradox: blue sky and the noise of shells. The soundscape is completely altered: You hear sounds you shouldn't be hearing like in a nightmare. It is unnaturally quiet, like in a film studio, simply because nothing works anymore." (Radovan Tadić)

Awards: FIPRESCI Award and Golden Dove, Leipzig 1993; FIPRESCI Award, Venice 1993; Best Film, San Francisco 1994

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