Germany 2025, 52/89 min, HDA Docdays Production
by Chiara Sambuchi
The Srebrenica Tape
Before the infamous massacre, Srebrenica was closed off from the world for more than two years. Nobody knew how the people lived there. One man made a video letter to his baby daughter outside. Today, the young woman goes on a journey to uncover her father and what happened leading up to the genocide.THE SREBRENICA TAPE is Alisa’s road trip to the old home country interwoven with footage from her father Sejfo's film, allowing a unique interior view from the enclosed and now disappeared town of Srebrenica.
The story of Srebrenica is told by those who were trapped in the town between 1993 and 1995, not only in retrospective, but in real time - captured by Sejfo on his VHS tape for his daughter.
In the video-letter, Sejfo remains silent about the cruelty of the conflict, he does not reveal any detail that could shock a young child. His ‘children’s film’ slowly dissolves into an authentic version of what happened to people caught in a seemingly never-ending siege.
Alisa inevitably reveals facts of the war and the genocide. And so, the audience has the chance to bear witness to this conflict in a new way.
Living in the US today, Alisa finds fragments of her story in what is left of her home, and puts together the still-missing pieces of a whole picture emerging before her eyes at the end of her journey.
The film is an intimate search for the traces Alisa’s father left behind and a cold-case investigation into how this genocide – with the European countries idly watching – came about.
Movies that Matter, Dok.fest Munich, Diagonale