Souvenir Srebrenica

July 1995.

Srebrenica fell into the hands of the Bosnian Serb troops of General Ratko Mladić: in a few days more than nine thousand men were killed and thrown into mass graves.

Souvenir Srebrenica is an investigative film on the Bosnian genocide that intertwines a theatrical monologue by Roberta Biagiarelli with archival materials and direct testimonies. The stage voice goes through the beginning of the war, life under siege and the stages of the fall, while the footage of the trials at the International Criminal Court in The Hague offers the historical framework of the facts. In between, the testimonies of the survivors and their odyssey during and after the war. The film also makes use of amateur archives, from fragments of life recorded by the inhabitants of the besieged city to an unprecedented look at the executioners. Filmed in Srebrenica in July 2005, with theatrical scenes set in the battery factory in Potočari—a former UN peacekeeper base, a symbol of ethnic cleansing—the film brings memory, documentary evidence and the present into dialogue, so as not to forget the last genocide that took place in Europe.