Our Bosnia Express, a documentary film directed by Massimo D’Orzi and produced by Loups Garoux and Il Gigante in association with Luce Cinecittà, is one of the titles in competition at the Festival Visioni dal Mondo, which will take place in Milan, in person, from 16 to 19 September.
The film proceeds in stages, station after station, with no pretense of saying anything more about Bosnia and its people, but rather with an intimate and penetrating desire to describe the reality of this country and to portray the contradictions between a world striving for growth, full of vitality and creativity, and a world plunged into ethno-religious extremism. Bosnia is a frontier country. Many have tried to turn it into a “non-place,” a no-man’s land. “But Bosnia is and has always been a crossroads of different languages, cultures and styles that we would like to try to revive in the collective memory by purifying them from ideologies and religious fanaticisms that in recent years have poisoned the wells of a civil coexistence that has lasted centuries. The women protagonists of this film are the highest response against the violence of those who trample on all humanity in the name of a god or the superiority of one ethnic group over another. Bosnia Express is the song of women’s resistance to the violence of a war wanted by men.”
"“Bosnia Express is the song of women’s resistance to the violence of a war wanted by men.”"
A train slowly crosses the The heart of the country: Sarajevo, Tuzla, Srebrenica, Konjic, Mostar. Women, religion, war, violence, and art are thrown across the screen like dice on a chessboard or played at Russian roulette. Life or death, truth or lies, are at stake. The camera probes the rediscovered order of things. How far can the gaze see to understand? A dance school, the corridors of the Faculty of Islamic Pedagogy, the rock music classrooms, the hill of Medjugorje, are the places from which the characters launch their investigation. But how can one hold the executioners or the victims accountable for such horror?