Que Faire? – My Father's Diaries

"My Father’s Diaries" by Ado Hasanović

I/FR, Documentary, 2024, 83 min

English and Bosnian with english subtitles

In August 1993, Bekir Hasanović trades a gold coin for a video camera, which he uses to document daily life in Srebrenica from that point onward. The footage he captures during the war, along with his makeshift crew, Dzon, Ben & Boys, presents an unexpected portrait of a disoriented population that holds on to reality with resilience and a healthy dose of humor. Ado, Bekir’s son, uses these recordings and his father’s diaries to reconstruct his image. Together with his mother, Fatima, he seeks to understand how Bekir survived the Death March and the Srebrenica genocide. "My Father’s Diaries" is a documentary about Bekir Hasanović, the filmmaker’s father. He himself was a filmmaker and an amateur cameraman during the harsh years of the Bosnian War. He was one of the few men to survive what is known as the Death March—a 100-kilometer trek through the woods undertaken by 15,000 Bosniak Muslims trying to escape the Serbs who sought to kill them. But Bekir didn’t just shoot videos and shorts. From July 7, 1992, the day his brother Piro died, he kept a daily journal until his journey on the Death March. Ado‘s aim with this film is to combine the story told in his diaries with the footage Bekir shot back then and the material Ado filmed himself. "My Father’s Diaries" is a meta-documentary that indirectly tells the story of Ado Hasanović‘s profound struggle to talk about his father. The images are raw and unpolished, making the viewer a witness to two men confessing their suffering. The narrative unfolds in the first person, like a diary—from the difficulty of finding a way to communicate with the father, through his harrowing memories, to the gratitude of having survived.

Ado Hasanović is a Bosnian-Italian film director based in Rome. A participant of Berlinale Talents Sarajevo in 2008, he completed a program at the Norwegian Nansen Academy in 2010, focusing on interethnic dialogue. In 2013, he earned his degree in directing from the Sarajevo Film Academy. He later continued his education at the prestigious Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, specializing in film directing, and attended the Master’s program in Dramaturgy at the Academy of Performing Arts in Sarajevo as a guest student.

In 2024, Ado founded the Silver Frame Film Festival in Srebrenica, aimed at honoring the city and its citizens, deeply affected by the traumas of the genocide, by providing a platform for artistic expression and resilience through cinema.  His short films, such as "The Angel of Srebrenica "(2010), "Mama" (2013), "Pink Elephant" (2017), "Nomofobia" (2018), and "Let There Be Colour" (2020), have been selected and awarded at many international film festivals. His first documentary, "My Father’s Diaries", produced by Palomar (Italy) and Mediawan (France), premiered in 2024 at Visions du Réel.