Hans Christian Schmid: Layers of Emotion and Tension
This post is also available in: Bosnian
Storm is a political thriller about the work of the ICTY. Its director, Hans Christian Schmid, talks to BIRN’s Justice Report about the research for the movie, the message in the movie, and Europe and Bosnia today.
Interview by: Nidzara Ahmetasevic
Q: Why did you make this film?
A: That is probably the most difficult question to answer. There are always a number of reasons why one decides to spend three years of one’s life and work focused on one subject.
Usually we find our themes in society around us. We are interested in American film from the seventies – new Hollywood cinema. These were political thrillers, not so much based on action, but, more or less, lets put it this way, on cinematic stories, based on issues relevant to society like the Watergate scandal, which spawned All The Presdient’s Men. This where we started from.
We came across a novel by a German writer about a young lawyer living in Vienna, who met with some Bosnian women. We talked about this novel, and discussed making it into a script, but it did not work, as it wasn’r really suited to the screen. But we became interested in the moral and political issues that it raised. Then, after reading a newspaper article about a German prosecutor at the tribunal, we met up with him. I think this meeting really confirmed to us that this film could work, how we could make the prosecutor the main character.
She had been dealing with the Foca cases, and also told us about her experience with victims and witnesses. From that point on, we had our story.
Q: What did you know about Bosnia and the war here before that?
A: Nothing. Or to be accurate, nothing more that the average German would know. We knew there had been a war – we had seen and read about it in newspapers and on TV. But, over time it got too complicated. And, you know how people are, there is something about sensation…
Like when Karadzic was caught and that news was in every newspaper, every day, for two weeks. But, after that, the way information works is… Look at the reports about the war in Iraq. There are very few people who have real, deep, consistent interest in what’s going on, who feel that they have to understand what is behind the war.
And, you know, I was in Munich at the film school, between 1992 and 1995 and Yugoslavia was just a country where I had been for holidays with my parents in the early eighties.
Q: What was the turning point in your research? When did it became a story about a prosecutor struggling to do her job, and victim desperate to find a way to tell her story?
A: It was a long process of writing and rewriting. On the one hand you are looking for drama – you want to entertain the audience, develop the narrative, adding intrigue and emotion. You want to leave a strong impression with people. On the other hand, you have to be faithful to your reaserch material, everything that people have told you, your books of notes.
And you try to make something that is an accurate reflection of what happened or at the very least, what could have happened. We were always sure that we did not want to focus on just one case. We wanted to go for a more general approach, something that could have happened recently, not something from 3, 4 years ago or back with Milosevic or whatever… And, we ended up with this compromise.
I also think we put together an interesting cast of characters. A woman in her 40s who is a prosecutor and a woman in her 30s who is not only a witness but also victim. And then, we met Nerma Jelacic here in our first week in Sarajevo, at the Tribunal. She came up from Visegrad and her information and our discussion about the Lukic case made us feel that we were not so far away from reality, which, of course, was important for us.
Q: What was the hardest part to understand about the war and work of the ICTY?
A: I do not know what was the hardest. I don’t think it is possible for a male author who lived in Berlin to come close to understanding or even imagining, what it was like to be raped during the war. We tried… I read the book about Omarska and we talked it through with the actress, but she too can not really imagine what it is like. So we tried to write a scene where she talks about what happened 15 years ago, that has an emotional level…
I will not even try to pretend that I know about the situation in Bosnia today. But for the script we really tried hard to be accurate,to match what a politician like Alic from Banja Luka would probably say.
We met someone there and we tried to understand what he was telling us. He said that he was one of the democratic forces in Republika Srpska, that he was glad that nationalistic parties are not so strong any more, that he beilives in Dodik.
On the other hand, we read a newspaper which explained things completely differently. So it’s a difficult process. Incorporating sentences into the script that explain that things are not black and white, that there are grey areas.
Yes there are young people in Banja Luka who want to have a good life, and yes it is probably difficult to have a connection between justice and law and politics but nothing is easy when it comes to a tribunal far away and the Hague… nothing is easy when it comes talking about the Dutch batallion in Srebrenica and everything that happend. Everything has many, many layers of emotion and tension and you can only try to be curious, to try to listen, to try to write a script and then to see where it ends.
Q: Since this is a story about the after effects of a war that happened in Europe just recently, how important is this movie for Europe?
A: I think it is very important. I do not know if many people will go to see it in Germany, France or The Netherlands, but this is a part of Europe, here, where we are sitting in Sarajevo… It is important to give to politicians time to find their way.
Q: You are cynical and critical of the EU in your film. Do you think that they need more time to understand the issues that you came to terms with in your research?
A: I do not know. We are just two script writers and we tried to understand for ourselves. They are a huge bureaucratic power. I think that post-war society doesn’t need five years after Dayton or even 15 years. It takes longer. Politicians in Germany at least, should know that. It may take 50 years until most of the country starts to think differently, even when the truth is so obvious.
Q: Do you want to send the message with the movie?
A: I can not do that. Because the movie is at the end of the day, just a movie. Whenever you try to deliver a message in a movie, it starts to fall apart and instead of telling your story, the characters end up speaking only in terms of the message.
I always have strong feelings about how things should work. I want those who see a film to leave a cinema wanting to start a discourse, but I do not believe that film really has the power to change politics.
That has only happened one or two times in the history of film. No, my message is that people should be tolerant and not to go to war for any reason at all, but to try to live with each other. And that goes for the people of Bosnia as well as for the whole Europe.
Q: How was it for you to watch this movie in Sarajevo?
A: Extremely emotional. I was really, really afraid that everything we’d done would prove to be wrong once people who lived here had come to see the film. I was afraid that they would say “go back to you country, where you know situation much better.” But that did not happen. I talked to lot of people who lived through the war who told me that it was good to have an outsider’s view on the times. I was really happy with that.
Q: What is the future of the movie?
A: The movie had its premiere in Berlin in February. In the next six months the film will be shown in France, Denmark, Austria, Switzerland…Then, also, festivals. We will show the film in India, and I have no idea how they will react.
