SNIJEG (SNOW)

(Bosnia Herzogovina, 2008, d. Aida Begic.)

Snijeg is a moving film about the aftermath of the Balkan wars. The setting is Bosnia Herzogovina in 1997-98.

The film is set in autumn-winter, a small village inhabited by refugees from other towns, all women except for the imam and a little boy who is mute because of the traumas of war. The group in the village try to earn a living by growing fruit, harvesting it and making preserves and jams which they sell by the roadside. The film is interesting in its presentation of this group of women, many of them very earthy. However, the central character, Alma, stands out. She is a devout Muslim, a widow who lives with her rather haughty mother-in-law who is the chief member of the village.

Possibilities open up: a group of entrepreneurs arrive from the city interested in buying up the land for development; on the other hand, after an accident on the highway where a truck crashes into the jam stall, the driver offers to transport all the jams and preserves and so develop a business. The postscript to the film indicates that the inhabitants did not sell their village but rather employed the young man and have built up a trade.

Throughout the film there is great regret at the death of the men, fathers and husbands, sons. One of the entrepreneurs is a Serb who comes, wanting to make some kind of recompense for the war, having saved one of the inhabitants of the village but unable to save another.

The film is very sad in showing the futility and ugliness and brutality of the clash between Serbs and Bosnians. The director is a young Bosnian woman, a writer-director