Images from the Corner

When she visited the circus in Sarajevo with her young daughter in 2003, filmmaker Jasmila Zbanic got a reminder of the war. The beautiful woman in the circus ring looked just like Bilja, the neighborhood girl who was badly wounded by a shell in the spring of 1992, during the first days of the siege of Sarajevo. Apparently innocent images veil painful memories of a war that ended in 1995 but lives on in a parallel reality in the minds of the people who live there. Zbanic sets off to hunt down information about what happened to Bilja, looking for new images to exorcise the old ones. In this personal and reflective search through post-war Sarajevo, the director is our guide and protagonist, visiting friends, neighbors and acquaintances. She uncovers the city’s silent scars: a place where people were murdered, the street corner where Bilja was hit, the camera-shy locals. But there is also friendship and happiness to be found in Sarajevo. Along the way she hits the boundaries of what can be captured by the camera, and of what she wants to show – a special role is reserved for a French photographer’s pitiless image of Bilja that won a World Press Photo Award.