© Courtesy Sejla Kameric, Anri Sala and Artangel
A tall, rakishly thin, angular-cheekboned woman walks through the streets of Sarajevo.
She is described as “elegant”, but in truth she looks as if she’s modelling this season’s finest new threads for a stroll through an Eastern European suburb on a chilly morning.
Inside a stark concrete complex, the city’s Symphony Orchestra tune up in their overcoats, each cog in the wheel obeying the command of their conductor as men stand and watch, then pass through.
They are practising Tchaikovsky’s 6th symphony, the Pathetique, and every parp and chime seems a perfectly melodious accompaniment to the tranquility of the gardens in the previous scene.
But the serene quickly shifts into the sinister in these films by Sejla Kameric and Anri Sala. The two artists fell out during the project, which now serves to unite both makers as they retrace a route known as Sniper Alley during the siege of the city between 1992 and 1996 (it lasted 1395 days).
Played by the Spanish actress Maribel Verdu, the woman moves in sync with the orchestra, then steels herself by humming their harmonies as she ventures through the memories of streets scarred by shootings, maimings, torture and riots. Hearing their movements in her head as she flinches and shuffles across shopping streets and beside motorways where citizens once fled for their lives.
On one of the pavements, an older woman struts proudly in a coat and pristine make-up. She is one of dozens of residents of the city who volunteered to become the actors in these cinematic revisitings.
We sense their trauma as they tread, the camera shifting between close-up portraits and distant overviews where their shadows stand against ancient houses, boutiques, butchers, fields and snow-covered parks.
They provide light relief when they huddle in tense groups on corners, reach for a cigarette and then sprint one-by-one across crossings, and their participation is heartfelt, brave and faintly comedic anyway, played out in places where little more than a decade ago they were being warned not to wear bright colours for fear of being shot.
© Courtesy Sejla Kameric, Anri Sala and Artangel
Viewed from the west, the atrocities which took 10,000 lives in the city – Kameric, a teenager at the time, was one of the survivors – seemed a faraway nightmare during the 1990s.
By the time Verdu reaches a tower block of flats, Tchaikovsky’s works have become the score to scenes which make us shudder with her. This is essential, if painful, viewing.
- Open Tuesday-Sunday, visit Artangel for screening times. Admission free.
