TAHIR CAMBIS



What was your journey towards film-making?

I think my journey started as a child born in a refugee camp. When you're a child in circumstances that are deprived or impoverished in some way, you're struggling to survive before you even get to first base; you're struggling just to exist. I was fortunate enough to not end up in jail like a lot of my contemporaries and got into the arts world. So, obviously, a sense of struggle pervaded everything I did, a sense of quest, whether it was working in theatre or in films. Often this is the making of somebody who doesn't seek a career but who seeks.

For a few years I worked as a playwright or a director of a theatre group. That's the medium through which I seek certain answers and issues, and the next minute it's documentary film, as it was with Exile in Sarajevo, because that was the medium which was most affecting, to a surprising degree, the outcome of that war. But documentary was also the most guilty of screening or blurring issues that concerned the outside world. So that was the medium I had to work in.

Is Exile in Sarajevo theatrical? It seems quite an open, cinematic and stylistic experience.

Exile in Sarajevo actually has dramatic structure based on a screenplay or theatre script, a structure of introduction of characters and situations, the dramatic background and resolution for a lot of the characters in their situation. It's quite influenced by drama and opera in that sense.

In theatre as a writer and a director, I was fortunate enough to be exposed to some people who, when taking on a project, would say, "Well, I know this method worked in the last project, but this project requires its own parameters." So when I approached Exile in Sarajevo, I was looking at maybe a dozen requirements: what is the problem with documentaries in television in the '90s; what are the issues trying to attack; how best to convey this; what is the city of Sarajevo and how best to convey that; how do you convey a whole city - and you must convey it through all its aspects, its cultural life; how do you imbue a film with all these issues, with a sense of history as well as the immediacy of the events in an hour and a half?

What you do then is go out there and immerse yourself in the subject matter or the experience in the case of documentary. You don't know. The worst mistake you can make on any creative project is to know how you can end up before you start, because then you're finished. You're going to make a cliched package formula-type project. The journey of exploration in any creative project should be just that, certainly with something as real-life as a siege of war in Sarajevo. I was asked to write a script.

Who initiated it?

The Australian Film Commission.

Your idea or theirs?

It was totally my idea. I'd gone there in 1992, unfunded, with just a video camera - I was wounded there the first time. So I'd already made the effort. But, instinctively, I also understood that Sarajevo was going to become an important city of the '90s because it was a city that was being attacked. Cities mean certain things, present certain things in civilisation. And how do a city's occupants fight back if they haven't got guns? It frustrated me enormously the reporting as well as the lack of understanding of anybody outside of there, apart from certain prominent individuals who obviously made Sarajevo their cause - Vanessa Redgrave, Susan Sontag and many others.

I would never do another film like that. The project required that style. The coverage of the war in Bosnia was video, so I wanted to re-create that look. I wanted to create a war aesthetic, because war is, in its own strange way, aesthetically interesting and beautiful. The other prime effects of television and documentaries is to sanitise and distance audiences from suffering. I wanted to introduce to the audience of the '90s the notion of redemption through suffering, which meant that they had to learn an old habit that they've tried to spend a lot of time getting away from, to introduce them to their own suffering.

That means making a film that brings them into the story. It makes the quest of the protagonist the quest for the audience as well. That also meant applying a certain style of editing, filming and structuring that brought the audience along for the ride, rather than their simply being passive observers.

The film is your quest, a journey of personal exploration.

I always knew the film was going to be radically different. I spoke on the phone from Sarajevo to the editor, Bill Murphy - he edited Romper Stomper - 'Bill, I don't know exactly what it's going to be, but I just want you to understand, when we get back and work together, music, editing styles, cinematic styles, everything goes, everything's an option, everything's a possibility, so before you and I even meet, you should know that's my attitude. There are no limits and no rules.' Of course, by the time we went into post-production, Bill essentially became the third director.

I know there are all these habits where you put together rushes and a sub-editor or an assistant editor puts together a series of shots, then the editor comes along and puts them together according to the script. The three of us sat there hour after hour during every session. We were never apart. And we negotiated and we would know, as a unit, which shot fitted into each sequence, and each sequence was edited to music. Narration was the very last thing to go in on the very last day of post-production. The whole film was edited to music, the change from one shot to another was basically on a downbeat or upbeat of the song. We were even toying with not having any narration at all, just having music and dialogue and imagery.

You also used poetry as part of the artistic communication.

Throughout the film we actually showed the arts in action. When we had soundtrack music or score, we always showed performers performing intercut with the action. This was to show, firstly the cultural life of the city going on regardless, a sense of dignity of the city rather than just a group of people you saw, just the main protagonists. But if you're trying to convey the soul, the spirit of the city, how do you do that? Well, music is a universal language. It also is something everybody can relate to, Brazilians, Dutch, Australians. There are many subliminal effects, and I really do believe that everybody sees different stories in different films.

So I think it's right to cram in lots of elements because then you have twelve people in a room going on twelve different journeys and, if they watch the film repeatedly, it's a dense film, they will see a different story each time as well. That's always true of any good literature or any good cinema. You'll go back and see it again and find something new.

This is the other aspect of the film. We had a simple theme of the quest of the individuals for, say, truth or understanding. But along the way there are all these other things happening, issues of European history, all sorts of other elements are brought in until we had a weaving mass of issues, instigated by certain events or just simply reinforced by certain events once they're introduced.

Could you expand on the cultural and religious traditions there, Moslem and Christian?

Bosnia was a geographical freak because it was a mountain country in between the Byzantine and Roman worlds in medieval times, evolving its own kind of style. By the time it became Christianised, it had evolved its own form of Christianity and its own church, a breakaway from the Catholic church but having close ties with it all the time. But it was forever going its own way - you could say for reasons of geography or history or whatever. It was always doing that. And it wasn't as rabid about rejection of the Ottomans' Islam that was brought there as some of the other Balkan countries, but it never quite lost its Christian identity as well. Most Bosnian Moslems have a very strong awareness of their Christian heritage and hold it quite dear. So, as European Moslems, they're quite unique.

The country is quite unique in its heritage and identity, religiously and nationally. There was never the word 'multiculturalism', but for a thousand years these influences were acknowledged rather than feared, celebrated rather than suppressed, and it's why the Jews, when they were expelled from Spain in the 1490s, were welcomed in Sarajevo. Rather than ghettos, they were absorbed and integrated into society there, always a proud place there.

So when the war began, the phraseology both of people who had vested interests - and that includes the UN and western governments who wanted an excuse not to act - phrases like, 'Historical inevitability', like 'the old enmities rearing their heads now that Communism is gone' - all this stuff was used, and this had nothing to do with Bosnia.

In the case of Bosnia it was Serbia with its expansionist agenda; you can't create the greater Serbia without taking from other people or exterminating them in some cases. The other thing was that a miracle was happening there: that those religious and cultural bonds between all the various communities in Sarajevo stayed solid throughout the war. Not one Serb was ever killed, you know, when a shell landed and people were massacred; nobody ever picked up a gun and walked down the road and killed a Serb neighbour in retaliation, because Serbs died in those massacres and Serbs were defending the city and Serbs were married to their sisters or their brothers, or they were part Serb themselves.

It was actually the outside world with its religious and racial bigotry that imposed these notions on this small country because they couldn't understand it. They had never heard of Bosnia before the war, and all they could do - in terms of trying to describe it, was categorise according to their own definitions. If you're a Muslim, you must be someone who is either a fundamentalist or anti-Christian and have these certain attitudes. If you're a Christian, then, of course, you two mustn't get on together because by nature Islam and Christian can't get on together, never did, which is another myth, of course.

But this is the danger of modern journalism, of ignorant people that have a lot of power, who think they're informed because they have powerful positions in the information revolution. That's not information. They don't know anything often, are quite ignorant. And Bosnia's little media can't cope with CNN, can't compete with CNN, it can't set the record straight. Someone is being labelled, being this or that, 'ancient ethnic hatred', 'they will hate each other', 'neighbour killing neighbour', all these phrases that were used. What could they do? They would say, 'Please don't say that about us. Look, here's my wife, she's a Serb. What are you saying about us?' And that would be edited out.

Of course, it's contradictory, too complicated. The audience can't cope with complications, keep it simple. It's a religious war. What are you going to say about Moslems a lot of whom are communists, a lot of them love their brandy, like bacon for breakfast. I mean, what sort of Moslems are these that they're talking about? That puts pressure on them then it is reinforced. For the Catholics and Orthodox in Bosnia, Bosnia is a lost cause. Nobody in the world supports it, nobody in the world supports the idea of a multicultural, multi-religious society any more. Why should we try?

That's the tragedy and that was the driving force behind the film, because I thought in the next century there are going to be articles and books, maybe small mentions in military history or the history of Europe, about how Bosnia was riven by ancient ethnic hatreds and they all hated each other. Somewhere there should be a document that says no, it wasn't true. But the other thing that could be said in the next century is we could have a major global war based on race and religion, if things start to go along the lines that have been evolving the last couple of years, and people will remember Bosnia as the place it started and the place they could have stopped it. Either way, we who have any access to expression in the arts or the media have an obligation now to say certain things, because it's not just our careers or our futures or our principles on the line, it's people's futures, people's lives.

People are going to write a history of Australian documentaries. There's going to be Damien Parer, there's going to be Neil Davis and there's going to be yourself and Exile in Sarajevo, so you are actually in a tradition but you are continuing a tradition. The influence of Damien Parer or a Neil Davis and what they mean to you in terms of what you've done?

Both those men, without thinking about it, were artists. There was artistry in their work and there was humanity in their work. The thing about war anywhere is that it affects you. The minute you start in any way sharing time with people who are dying, you take on certain things, you just can't get away from it. Anybody who has been in any war for any length of time, any correspondent, anybody who has worked in anything, they often come back to their societies feeling that their own society is somehow spiritually impoverished and in fact real spirituality, intellectual stimulation and all the issues that they care about are to be experienced and thought about and are active where they've just come from, while their friends look at them and say, 'How can you say that? We're all so civilised here, we've got peace and stability.'

In fact, it's not quite that. People like Neil Davis and Damien Parer obviously had these experiences. I know when I was filming in '92 on a front line with soldiers, there was a strange chemistry, there's a strange something - when you're looking through your viewfinder and you're panning back from a battlefield across to a line of soldiers laying on their bellies and you suddenly come across a young face and the face is staring at the viewfinder, and the face is terrified and he's looking at you, and he's so terrified, he's not even aware that his terror is showing, he's just looking at you. You pull back and you're thinking all sorts of things - will he die tomorrow, will he die today - or sitting on a bus going to the front and everybody's singing, and you pull your camera across and someone turns to the camera and says, 'We're singing because we know a lot of us aren't coming back'. What do you say to those? And you pull your camera across again and there's one boy who isn't singing, he's looking out the window quietly and the tears are running down his cheeks, and he died that day. Of course, these things affect you because you have grabs of humanity, you know a person for a little while and they're gone.

Or in my case that day, I met my cousin, we had a little chat round the fire, we found out we were cousins coming from the same village, my father and his father, and two hours later I'm carrying him across an open field, running at full pelt to avoid snipers because he'd been hit in the chest by shrapnel and he was bleeding all over the place, and he's aware of my camera filming him at the same time - he's performing for the camera, he's not that badly wounded that he can't put on his good profile for the camera. So I think with Parer and Davis, who I read about and saw their work years before I went to Bosnia, I was just inspired by their experiences and I always knew one day I wanted to film a war. I never in my life thought that it would be the country I came from. I never thought that.

I did entertain ideas of going to Irian Jaya, places like that. At one stage I even purchased a 16mm camera and had been ready to go. But I decided to finish writing my play instead. So years before Bosnia, I was inspired by these people. Of course, they were legends. Neil Davis probably helped change the course of the war in the west with some of the key footage he filmed, in terms of swaying opinions. He filmed entire stories with his little three minutes of footage that went to air each night - the Vietnamese colonel that shot the guy in the head in the street - so many shots, but he was always smart, he was always intelligent and very conscious of his obligations and yet ethical. And he thought that this war was the Vietnameses' war and they should be in the picture, which was quite extraordinary.

You've used the word spirituality and you also spoke about redemption through suffering. More and more people these days rely on the word 'spirituality' as a universal theme of human values and aspirations. So, in a sense, you have experienced a spirituality of war.

Yes, I have. But I suppose I've experienced spirituality in my life long before that. There's a Bosnian word called 'dohar', which means soul, which is used often in everyday conversation when discussing people, 'my soul connects with your soul', and they use this openly as a way of trying to say, 'We talk to each other with words, but many things are happening between us at other levels.' That's what that really means. In Anglo-Celtic? society this is often looked upon as a bit sentimental, but in a Slavic society this is an open thing.

It's not a question of does it happen - of course it happens, of course we're exchanging with each other on many levels. Sometimes it's in fear. And even the person you hate is in some way part of you, you have a connection together. It's a different sense of humanity and how humanity works. It's based, I guess, on my cultural origins. But also having suffered terribly in my life as a child and watched my mother suffer and commit suicide, long before the war came, this notion of, if you can just get through the suffering and make something of it, it becomes a strength, it becomes a valuable asset. You draw upon it to understand, and not only to understand, to act rather than merely to complain.

So in war it's just one extreme version of suffering where you get to see the true nature of the human condition - extreme cowardice, extreme courage, extreme stinginess and extreme generosity. And none of it is predictable. You don't know what you're going to be on that day, because I have been an extreme coward, I have been extremely brave, I've been very stingy with my cup of coffee - I didn't want anybody else to know I had coffee that day, I wasn't going to share it. At other times I just gave everything I had. And fear of death - I mean, I nearly died. The day I was wounded, I was left by the soldiers who I thought had abandoned me, but they got out of the way of the bullets that were coming in. Nobody could get near me. And I looked down at my leg and I realised I couldn't do anything, it was shattered. I watched the blood going into the ground. The thought struck me for a second, oddly, 'My God, for a thousand years people's blood has gone into this soil'.

It's a strange thought. You think, this has gone on for so many centuries, everywhere. People lie on the ground, their blood flowing into the soil and, for the first time, I understood why people have a connection to land or soil. Before that I had no interest. Then I thought, 'How do you prepare for death? I'm going to bleed slowly. Can I get away from the path so that the Serbs don't find me and maybe torture me. I want to die peacefully.'

Then I looked up at the canopy of the forest and I saw - perhaps hallucinated - the faces of my friends in Melbourne, all smiling at me and seeming to be saying, 'You fool, what are you doing here, because you're an idiot'. So I just lay there. I just waited to die and I was very much at ease. I was very peaceful. After the initial pain and screaming, I waited to die. I was quite prepared to die. Then the shelling stopped and they came and got me. But what happened? They put me in a car and five minutes later the car plunged off a cliff into a river. And when I regained consciousness, I was trapped up to my neck in mountain water. Then my spirituality came forth and I really was thinking God is after my arse today. I just thought he's not going to let me go. I really thought that. I thought he wants me and, if I get out of this, he's going to get me another way.

A postscript. Michael Winterbottom made Welcome to Sarajevo. There was Angelopolous' Ulysses' Gaze and Before the Rain. How do these films compare with yours, since these are fiction feature films communicating with a wide audience. There was also the Serbian film, Pretty Village, Pretty Flame.

I think modern society doesn't quite know how to be intellectually critical of films. It's geared towards entertainment, so when something has political connotations, they're often susceptible to being fooled. Pretty Village, Pretty Flame was the second film that came out of Belgrade during the war. Underground, the first, was made by a Emir Kusterika, a Bosnian director who more or less was a defector. So, as long as it's clever and arty, which is what the language of sophisticated cinema in Europe is today, it's about being clever and being arty and being artistic but not actually daring to say anything.

Pretty Village, Pretty Flame was a clever film that pressed all the right buttons in the film industry. It was actually pushing the same propaganda message that Serbia had used to declare war in the first place, that war was inevitable, these people hated each other and that, once you got to know the Serbs, really they're quite cute, the international Serbs, and they're quite harmless. It was just propaganda. Of course, the shocking thing about that particular film was that it was about Serbians under siege by Bosnians in 1992. But they had no weapons. The whole Bosnian war was based on Serbs either rounding up Bosnians for extermination in death camps or besieging cities and just pounding the hell out of them.

It was supposed to be based on a true story. A lot of things are based on a true story "loosely". That particular story took place when Bosnia was being siege by Serbian forces with vastly superior tanks and jets and artillery. But what was more offensive was the notion that the hatred was just natural when it wasn't. That was really more offensive than anything else. But to an audience who decided that Bosnia was confusing and "what's it got to do with us?", it's just entertainment.

And Welcome to Sarajevo, unfortunately, probably has the same problems. People still haven't identified why this war important. Exile in Sarajevo reached people and made them think that it was important, though the issue there was about them. But the one crucial achievement of that film was that everybody felt they were participating in it somehow. But what you're dealing with in the '90s is people who are politically illiterate. Audiences and critics know nothing other than the standard knowledge of symbols past and present of what fascism means. And fascism is a scary word. We didn't dare use that word about the Balkan crisis earlier. Now it's starting to creep into the language again, because it's the most extreme expression. But even now, people still refer to Germany in the '30s as a model when it is happening now. It's still happening now. But if they ever, as an audience or as a collective community in the western sphere, acknowledge that this is what it was, then the question arises, "why didn't we try to stop it?" So they mustn't say that word. There's a guilt thing attached here, a conspiracy of silence. "Let's call this the Balkan thing where everybody hated each other..."


Interview: 23rd July 1998