Jasmila Žbanić
After After, Red Rubber Boots, Images From The Corner
Films
September 9 to October 16, 2005

Opening
Thursday, September 8, 2005, 7 p.m.
>> Opening Speech

Jasmila Žbanić belongs to an important group of filmmakers who as very young art students experienced firsthand the war against Bosnia-Heregowina and against the capital city of Sarajevo in particular. While the war was still waging, they decided to begin making films.
The institutional framework in which Jasmila Žbanić shows her films is that of contemporary art exhibitions or projects and not so much that of cinema. The conceptual approach employed by Žbanić is documentary and based on extensive research. Her subject matter – the war in Bosnia – did not become moot for the filmmaker and the populace once the battles and attacks on the civilian population, which lasted from 1992 to 1995, were over. Žbanić analyzes the consequences of the war, focussing on individual fates to show the horrible repercussions of this war for the people.
In this exhibition project at the Galerie im Taxispalais Jasmila Žbanić is showing three films: After, After (1997, Video, 16min), Red Rubber Boots (2000, 18min) and Images From the Corner (2003, 45min).

After, After addresses the traumatization of children in Sarajewo as a result of the war. The documentary film is based on the question “what are you afraid of?“ which a psychologist asked school children. The answers to this question show the toll the war took on the psyche of children. In the case of seven-year olf Balma, whom Žbanić focuses on in her film, the horror of a child’s experience almost leads to total silence. Žbanić succeeds in giving the little girl a voice and in visualizing, in short sequences, the entire tragic dimension of her short life.

Red Rubber Boots deals with the search of a mother, Jasna P., for the mortal remains of her two children Amar (4 years) and Ajla (9 months). The children were kidnapped and killed by the Serbian army during the final days of the Bosnia war and allegedly buried in a mass grave. With the help of the state commission for the search of missing persons Jasna P. studied the available information, accompanied the search commission and visited all mass graves in the hope of finding the red rubber boots that her son was wearing when he was abducted and disappeared from her life, so that she could finally get some closure on her children’s fate.

In Images From the Corner (2003) Žbanić takes up the history of Bilja, who as a twenty year-old, in 1992, was shot at and wounded in front of her apartment building and lost her arm as a result. A well-known French photographer took pictures of her while she was bleeding and needed help desperately. He did not assist her but photographed her instead and became famous for the photograph. But what about Bilja? What happened to her?

The filmic means and the filmic idiom characterizing the works of Jasmila Žbanić are not just informed by the medium of film, they are also influenced by her work with puppet and street theater as well as her literary activities. In addition to her film scripts Žbanić also writes stories and theatre texts.

Jasmila Žbanić was born 1974 in Sarajevo where she still lives today.

Publications Das Kind, die Frau, der Soldat, die Stadt (The Child, the Woman, the Soldier, the City); an anthology of Bosnian-Herzogovinian short stories; Es gibt keinen Börek mehr (There is no more Börek), a theatre text; both were published by Drava Verlag, Germany.

Thanks to Annemarie Türk
With support from