''Bosnia Diaries'' ( pt, Diários da Bósnia) is a 2005 independent Portuguese

documentary film A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in te ...

directed by

Joaquim Sapinho Joaquim Sapinho (born 1965 at Sabugal, Portugal) is a Portuguese film director. Founder of production company Rosa Filmes, he is considered to be part of ''The School of Reis'' film family. Career Joaquim Sapinho was a student at the Portugue ...

and produced at Rosa Filmes, which had its world premiere at the 2005

Pusan International Film Festival The Busan International Film Festival (BIFF, previously Pusan International Film Festival, PIFF), held annually in Haeundae-gu, Busan (''also'' Pusan), South Korea, is one of the most significant film festivals in Asia. The first festi ...

. The film narrates Joaquim Sapinho's experience in Bosnia during and after the

Yugoslav Wars The Yugoslav Wars were a series of separate but related Naimark (2003), p. xvii. ethnic conflicts, wars of independence, and insurgencies that took place in the SFR Yugoslavia from 1991 to 2001. The conflicts both led up to and resulted from ...

Reception

The film had its world premiere in 2005, at the

, in

South Korea South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia, constituting the southern part of the Korean Peninsula and sharing a land border with North Korea. Its western border is formed by the Yellow Sea, while its eas ...

, whose

partition Partition may refer to: Computing Hardware * Disk partitioning, the division of a hard disk drive * Memory partition, a subdivision of a computer's memory, usually for use by a single job Software * Partition (database), the division of a ...

with

North Korea North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the northern half of the Korean Peninsula and shares borders with China and Russia to the north, at the Yalu (Amnok) and T ...

resulted in a special interest on the film by the festival. The film was part of the official selection of various film festivals, including the

Torino Film Festival The Torino Film Festival (also called the Turin Film Festival, TFF) is an international film festival held annually in Turin, Italy. Held every November, it is the second largest film festival in Italy, following the Venice Film Festival. It was f ...

, and the Portuguese documentary festival DocLisboa.Infos at rosafilmes.pt
click on "''ENG''", then on "''DIRECTORS''", then on "''JOAQUIM SAPINHO''"

Production

Released in 2005, ''Bosnia Diaries'' was shot between 1996 and 1998 in Bosnia. During its editing process, Sapinho shot another feature, ''

The Policewoman ''The Policewoman'' ( pt, Mulher Polícia) is an independent Portuguese drama film directed by Joaquim Sapinho, produced at Rosa Filmes, which had its world premiere in 2003 at the Berlin International Film Festival. Plot The film tells the stor ...

'', which would be released first, in 2003, becoming his second as director. Delaying ''Bosnia Diaries release to 2005, the two films were post-produced simultaneously. They would influence each other, both in style as in theme, as ''Bosnia Diaries'' edition would suffer a complete conceptual change in consequence of the things Sapinho lived and discovered throughout the shooting and editing of ''The Policewoman'', whose, on the other hand, darkness and realism are clearly echoes of the Bosnian War experienced by Sapinho, which would cause a great change on his vision of the world.

Concept

The film is a cinematic reflexion on

war War is an intense armed conflict between states, governments, societies, or paramilitary groups such as mercenaries, insurgents, and militias. It is generally characterized by extreme violence, destruction, and mortality, using regular o ...

, on

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located entirel ...

and on

civilization A civilization (or civilisation) is any complex society characterized by the development of a state, social stratification, urbanization, and symbolic systems of communication beyond natural spoken language (namely, a writing system). ...

, structured in the form of a film-diary, in which Joaquim Sapinho reports his experiences lived in the two times he went to Bosnia. The film is composed of two sets of images, from two different shooting periods. One corresponds to the first time Sapinho went to Bosnia, in 1996, the other to the second time, in 1997. Both sets of images are, nevertheless, shown edited together, being only distinguishable by the somewhat sepia tone of the images from the first trip.

References

External links

Bosnia Diaries official page at Rosa Filmes web site
(click on "ENG", then on "DIRECTORS", then on "JOAQUIM SAPINHO", then on "BOSNIA DIARIES")
Bosnia Diaries at IMDb
Portuguese documentary films 2000s Portuguese-language films 2005 films Films directed by Joaquim Sapinho Films shot in Bosnia and Herzegovina Bosnian War films Documentary films about the Siege of Sarajevo Documentary films about refugees Documentary films about the Bosnian genocide Cultural depictions of Ratko Mladić {{Portugal-film-stub