A young Australian man returns to Srebrenica a dozen years after he left as a boy, a dozen years after the devastation of war, a dozen years after the worst genocide in Europe since World War II.

Saidin Salkic (known as Mido) is an Australian of Bosnian origin. He was twelve in July 1995 at the time of the Srebrenica massacre, in which more than 9000 people were killed. Srebrenica is Mido’s home town. It is a beautiful village which nestles at the foot of a luxuriant mountain valley in far eastern Bosnia, 15 km from the River Drina. Mido was nine when war broke out in the Balkans, bringing troops, armour, explosions, excitement
and danger to enliven the games the children played in the fields and forests around the town. Three years later, despite it having been declared a safe haven by the United Nations, the Serbian army entered the town and took away the men and boys, including his father. They tried to take Mido too, but he was saved by his mother’s frantic actions, which almost cost her her life.

Mido, his mother and sister lived for years in camps, wrecked buildings and temporary constructions. They ran gauntlets of foreign troops. Together with other refugees, they endured many privations, fear, hunger, cold, uncertainty. Eventually they found their way to Australia, where Mido resumed his education and went on to complete a university degree in performance and drama. He never saw his father again - not, that is, until the
tenth anniversary of the massacre when he was watching the SBS news and saw a fragment of a recently discovered video made by the infamous Scorpion death squad which had carried out the killings. In the background, he recognised the blue shirt his father had been wearing. Mido subsequently obtained the entire footage, with its unspeakable confirmation of the crime which had already transformed his life.

Two years later, Mido, now twenty four, returns to Srebrenica. He wants to understand not what happened but how such things are possible, to try to find a way forward for himself and all the others, to discover what remains of beauty in a world so overcome with desolation and darkness. He returns with his camera and, despite the pain and the abiding grief, with hope. The result is a moving, courageous personal statement: a poetic meditation on war and beauty, on the possibility of a path forward out of the morass left by war and genocide.

“Karasevdah Blues” is Saidin Salkic’s first film. It is a document of Australian reconciliation. It is a journey through memory, an intimate and loving dialogue with the landscape of his birthplace, drawing the breath of beauty and life from it, seeking to move out from the shadows of the past to embrace new futures. The parallel between the tasks facing the survivors of Srebrenica and the challenges still confronting indigenous people around our country is striking. After watching the film, indigenous leader Professor Marcia Langton AM, Chair of Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne, said: “…I was reminded of my own historical burden… While a very personal statement about love and attachment, it answers the terrible question on the lips of far too many people who have experienced loss and suffering: how can we overcome this intimacy with death and learn to see the beauty and joy in the world?".

The film is produced with the support of Professor Paul Komesaroff and the Global Reconciliation Network and will be launched by Marcia Langton and Professor Richard Larkins AO, Vice Chancellor of Monash University.

INFO:
e-mail: midotheminstrel@yahoo.com.au