No doubt the Abu Dhabi Film Festival has, over the last few years, established itself as one of the most important festivals in the Middle East — especially since political conflicts over the same period of time have resulted in reduced support for such pioneering film events as the Cairo, Damascus, Carthage and Tunis festivals. This is the ninth year in the history of the Abu Dhabi Festival, and the second under the directorship of the Emirati Ali Al-Jabri; and the Gulf event resumes its force with a huge number of remarkable films from all over the world: over 90 full-length and 70 short films. The film critic feels spoilt for choice. Among these the Bosnian filmmaker Danis Tanovic — whose 2001 No Man's Land won an Oscar in 2002 and a best screenplay award at Cannes — offers another award-winning film, An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker, which won the jury and best actor prizes at the 2013 Berlin Film Festival. The film is a retelling of the real-life tragedy of a Roma family living in a remote area, and it documents the extremely difficult life circumstances of this destitute family using the real heroes as actors: the father, Nazif Mujic, and the mother, Senada, and their two little daughters. Senada — who cleans the incredibly small house, cooks the food and takes care of the four- and six-year-olds while pregnant — feels a strong pain in her stomach and sustains a haemorrhage, so the couple rushes to the hospital, only to find out that the feotus in her body has already died and she requires an urgent operation without which she could lose her life. Yet the operation is costly and, without a stable income or any form of health insurance, husband and wife do not know what to do. Before this crisis is reached, Tanovic depicts the work of Mujic. The action unfolds in winter and the primitive heating in the house relies on wood. In an innovative technique, the camera trails the father at high speed as he goes into the woods, cuts a tree, and carries the trunk to chop it up out at his door. This is not too different from the work he does with his neighbour, which is to chop up abandoned cars using an axe or hand saw, and convey it in a car to the scrap dealer for a tiny amount of money that nonetheless enables the family to live for a few days. But Senada's need for an operation is hardly the end of Tanovic's work, in which he seeks to demonstrate the simple life of a family living away from the urban centres of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the structure of the state, with all its routine complications. The crisis is resolved when Selana manages to obtain her sister's medical care card to present as her own; nor do the doctor or nurse pay too much attention to the discrepancies between card and card holder, due to the state of Selana's health. Nor does Tanovic suggest any racism in the doctor and nurse's attitude despite the fact that the Roman are racially persecuted in Europe. He rather presents the difficulties of poor people living outside the state system, which is more or less what Mujic says to the doctor while begging him to treat his wife. Most scenes are filmed from behind the figures of the characters, as if the camera is running after them, showing the details of their lives and what they do. And in this way too Tanovic presents the love that binds Mujic to Selana and cheerfulness in the house through the children, Sesma and Sandra, which all makes the tragic nature of the material both more believable and bearable to the viewer. The film, which was shot in nine days and cost only 350,000 euros, was screened as a fiction feature in Berlin, but other festivals classified it as a documentary. Tanovic himself refuses to classify it, saying he doesn't know how to describe the end result of an idea that began with him reading about this family and deciding to present its tragedy on the silver screen. He had no script or clear plan, the film was shot spontaneously. And following the premiere of the film Mujic obtained a regular job as a cleaner, with medical insurance, and his wife had another child. When the child fell sick, a hospital treated him for a whole week free of charge, and Tanovic imagines this is thanks to the film. *** Another film that shares much with Tanovic's is Jasmila Zbanic's For Those who Can Tell no Tales, which is also low-budget and also based on a personal, real-life experience. Zbanic is a well-known director whose Grbavica won the Belinale's Golden Bear in 2006. This time she offers an account of the Australian stage director Kym Vercoe's account of her visit to the Bosnian border town of Visegrad, which was the site of much torture and murder during the Yugoslavian civil war. The film opens with a scene in which Vercoe (who plays herself) is at a security bureau being interrogated about the reason for her being in Visegrad. The officer and interpreter seem to question her story of being simply an Australian tourist. The scene shifts to Vercoe's travel arrangements for an earlier trip, after reading the Yugoslav writer and 1961 Nobel laureate Ivo Andric's novel The Bridge of Drina, telling of the torture and murder witnessed there in the 16th century under the Ottomans, the setting of which she wants to see for herself — and so visited Yugoslavia for the first time. And even though the opening is somewhat weak from the point of view of structure, yet the choice of novel plays perfectly to the central theme of the film, which is to present this town and introduce the horrors that occurred there in 1992: the film focuses especially on the state of denial on which the townspeople insist, the better to forget what happened. On her first visit, the protagonist has a basic idea that tragedy occurred here, but what drives her second visit is her failure to sleep in her hotel room. She had rented a room near the bridge based on her travel book recommendation, and when she returned to Australia she wrote to the author taking issue with him for not mentioning the fact that the building of the hotel was a Serbian detention camp that witnessed dozens of rapes of Bosnian women. This otherworldly state, Zbanic attempts to embody through imagery on the second, winter journey, when she has Vercoe surrounded by the white of snow and the dryness of plant life as well as an altogether cool palette of colour. The implication is of something negative — later spelled out when Vercoe begins to speak to many residents some of whom feel proud of their Serbian society while others deny or purposefully forget the horror. The central idea is that crimes of the past will always return, and be repeated. This is a personal quest underlined by the idea of the title, which is that the value of a historical place resides not only in that place's age or even the stories one can tell about it but also in the stories that cannot be told, in the horrors and tragedies the place has witnessed. Human memory should be built on reminding people of such events, however horrendous, so that they will not be repeated. When places are reduced to tourist attractions without stories, Zbanic seems to be saying, they most probably will be.
