Jasmila Zbanic's For Those Who Can Tell No Tales follows an Australian tourist as she discovers the silent legacy of wartime atrocities in a seemingly idyllic town on the border of Bosnia and Serbia.
For Those Who Can Tell No Tales
Synopsis
Jasmila Zbanic's For Those Who Can Tell No Tales follows an Australian tourist as she discovers the silent legacy of wartime atrocities in a seemingly idyllic town on the border of Bosnia and Serbia. On a summer holiday through Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kym is the picture of an average tourist: visiting the sites promoted in her guidebook and keeping a video diary. Yet her stay at a hotel in Visegrad inexplicably gives way to anxiety and sleepless nights. Upon returning home to Australia, she finds out that the Vilina Vlas hotel was used as a rape camp during the war. Questions around the region's atrocities begin to haunt her, as does the question of why the guidebook, or the town itself, made no mention of the event. The testimonies she later finds online compel her to return to Visegrad and investigate this hidden history for herself.
Rape and other types of sexual violence against women were widespread during the wars in the former Yugoslavia, including Bosnia-Herzegovina. Human Rights Watch documented thousands of rapes, killings, and acts of sexual violence against women by all warring parties. In the town of Foca in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Human Rights Watch documented mass rapes of Bosnian women by Serb soldiers and police in various detention centres as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign between 1992-1994. In 2001, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ruled the Foca mass rapes as war crimes for the first time in history.