Between 1993 and 1995, artist and photographer Louis Jammes took pictures of people on the streets of Sarajevo under siege and gave them angelic face and wings. Then he put his huge portraits on destroyed city walls. Suddenly, it seems as life is getting back with their arrival, because they brought a sense of peace, beauty, nostalgia...
This is a film that shows portraits of three children who lived in Sarajevo during the siege. Through their stories the film tries to give a picture of youngsters who live in the war for three and a half years and their efforts to overcome the trauma. The stories are seemingly separate, but the thread that connects them is a three-year-old boy who on his tricycle constantly wanders the streets of Sarajevo, passing everywhere and always seeing everything. He takes us from one child to another, opening up before us a picture of the bizarre life of children in Sarajevo.
Totally Personal creates a historical document both droll and touching out of Begovic and his family's memories, meditations, and observations. The history begins in the communist era, continues through the war that ravaged the former Yugoslavia and into today's post-war period.
This film deals with the atrocities of war as portrayed by a film student who spends some time working as a medic. One of the duties he performed was to carry amputated limbs to the cremation furnace. This is a film about the collective madness that engulfed Sarajevo. A one-armed boy is troubled because he can't make big, firm snowballs; a man who lost both legs demonstrates walking on his stumps... The film and the director's story help us understand the commotion and tumult that have occurred in the minds of Sarajevans.
Asthmatic grandmother named Safa and her six-month baby granddaughter Jasmina, are transferred in a humanitarian convoy from the besieged Sarajevo to a peaceful small city at the Adriatic coast. By a combination of circumstances, their first neighbour is an alcoholic named Stipe. He is constantly causing troubles and making their lives complicated. During one of her asthma attacks, having no other choices, Safa rings Stipe's bell and hands him the baby. Stipe starts to temporarily take care about baby Jasmina. Safa dies at the hospital and now Stipe is left alone with the baby. He's clumsy, even funny. She becomes his only mission in life. He is not ready to give Jasmina away to anyone. He loved her as if his own granddaughter even daughter. Suddenly someone is at the door. Stipe recognises Jasmina's mother. In spite of all his internal struggles, he returns Jasmina to her mother. Stipe stays alone, again.
A hotel in the centre of town is a war-time home and refuge for many of Sarajevo's homeless people. Every morning they leave the hotel and wander around the destroyed city gathering again at the defunct hotel in the afternoon. This film follows their separate fates through the bitter comparing of images of the bums with those of dogs abandoned by their owners and now left et the mercy of the war ravaged streets of Sarajevo.
Made by the Sarajevo Group of Authors (SAGA), a collective created during the siege of Sarajevo, this documentary captures stories of war that occurred during the conflict.
