The film for Srebrenica on the narrow list for “Oscarin Italian” ♫ “Father Tim”

Father Tim's documentary Diaries (I diari di mio padre) by director Ada Hasanovic has been selected for the prestigious David di Donatelo award, often called Oscar Italian, in the Best Documentary category. The film held the world premiere at the Visions du Réel festival in 2024 and has shown up more than a hundred times so far.

Hasanovic points out that the film was created by a personal need to confront his family's past. “Filmi was created by a need to understand what happened to me and my family during the war and, above all, to give meaning to the content my father wrote and filmed”, the director said.

Her father, Becky, traded a gold dune for a camera VHS during the war in Srebrenica, then a protected United Nations area. Along with his friends Izetin (Ben) and Nexhadin (boys), he founded the amateur television team “John, Ben and Boys” and recorded the daily lives of people trying to preserve a normal image of war circumstances. Ado Hasanovic claims that the creative process of work in the film was therapeutic for him: “The creative process was a real therapy for me and, I dare say, a way to overcome at least partially my trauma. ”

Bekir Hasanovic is one of the few men who survived the March of Death, a hundredkm journey through the forest, in which about 15,000 Bosnians tried to escape from Serb forces, while fewer than half arrived in Tuzla.

My father never wanted to talk to me about how he survived the genocide at Srebrenica”, says Ado, adding that his mother Fatima supported him at that moment, who was willing to separate details from the past and encourage Becky to speak.

The turning point came in 2016, after Becky survived a heart attack. I started filming it with a camera ever since. Whenever I returned home, I would pick up my camera and ask him questions for which I never got answers. He always behaved differently before the camera upset, sometimes it was almost impossible to be there. I didn't surrender”, the director recalls.

In addition to the videos, Bekir kept six journals that began to write on July 7, 1992, the day his brother Piro was killed by a land mine, and he continued until his departure to March Death. Before leaving, he did not entrust the journals to his wife, who was in Tuzla with the children, but Seka, the woman he loved in Srebrenica, with the request that if he died, she gave it to his family. After he survived, Seka gave the journal to Fatima, who kept them and hid them from her son for years. My father's journal reading made me cry, but it made me laugh. What he experienced seems unrealistic, almost surreal”, Ado says.

The film combines three types of materials: recordings made by Ado Hasanovic trying to understand the silence of his father, VHS archives made by Bekir Hasanovicić in the 1990s, and parts of the journals the director reads in confession. Becky used to tell her son: ”

Bekir Hasanovic passed away on June 22, 2020, from a heart attack to 58 years old. His death was the hardest moment of my life. He wasn't just my father. He was the first to teach me how to carry a camera. The film is my way of thanking him and celebrating”, Ado said.

The “Editors of Father Tim” tell the story of the inability to communicate between a father and a son about the trauma of war, and the author describes the film as a meta-documentary showing a story in the first person through raw and raw images, leaving the impression that the viewer is secretly witnessing the two men's struggle with trauma. /Periscope