That the Women Live!

Colour, 35mm
France, 2001, 83 min
Section: Documentary Films in Competition

Synopsis

Survive? How? With no husband, no father, no sons, brothers, cousins, with no men in the family? How can you survive when your whole world has collapsed? When it seems that time has stood still? The atrocities committed by the Serbs in 1992-1995 compelled countless Bosnian women and children to ask these questions. This documentary tells the story of three of them. Sedina, Jasmina and Senada are village girls whose husbands and other male family members disappeared during the war. They lost everything. Several years later all three moved into Vive Zene, an organisation with headquarters and treatment centre in Tuzla, Bosnia, which helped them to begin their lives again and take control of their own destiny. We trace their progress, step by step, as they attempt to rise from the dead. This story echoes similar tragedies from the past and present and poses fundamental questions concerning sorrow, love and life.

About the director

Laurent Bécue-Renard (b. 1966, Paris) was Editor-in-Chief of the Internet magazine Sarajevo OnLine which was published in the city itself during the last year of the war in Bosnia (1995-96). He studied at the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris and at the ESSEC graduate school of economics. He was also a Fulbright scholar at Columbia University in New York. This film is his debut. It was awarded the Peace Film Award at the 2001 Berlin International Film Festival.