Ten Minutes in Sarajevo
Images of war-torn cities are perversely fascinating. Grozny, Mogadishu, Kabul—they are hollow emblems of urbanity where people try to survive within the rubble of their own lives. Cities don’t simply die when they are torn apart by bombs and artillery; they transform into something battered and ghostly, something undead.
Of course, this is all conjecture on my part. I have never known anything even remotely similar to war. My perceptions are shaped by film and news footage. But bloody cinéma vérité and gruesome documentaries cannot convey the terror and deprivation of life in an actual war zone. For people like me, the psychological—if not geographic—gulf is too great.
This is one of the themes of Ahmed Imamovic’s 2002 short film, 10 minuta. Set in 1994, it opens with a Japanese tourist asking for directions in a caricatured Rome. Wandering past the Pantheon, he happens upon a camera store that claims to develop film in just ten minutes. Inside, the overly animated store clerk assures the Japanese man that, yes indeed, technological advancements allow him to process photos in a very short amount of time.
That’s where the fantasy ends. As the tourist waits for his photos, the camera cuts to Sarajevo and a straightforward, realistic depiction of a boy’s venture outside of his apartment block. Suddenly, shells start to fall. Everything you expect to happen does. The cruel irony of 10 minuta lies in its juxtaposition of a devastated Sarajevo with a cartoonishly prosperous Rome, just five hundred kilometres away.
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