The Perfect Circle

Sarajevo under siege. The poet Hamza gets his wife and daughter out of the city and stays behind alone; he drinks, he cannot write, he is afraid to go outside. One day two children come into the house: two brothers who survived the massacre in their village and have come looking for a lost aunt. The man tries to send them away, then gives up. Ademir Kenović's film is counted the first Bosnian film made after the war. It could only be shot in 1996, after the Dayton agreement; the screenplay had been rewritten during the siege. It won the François Chalais prize at Cannes in 1997. The telling does not make the siege a backdrop, but it is not only the siege either; three people getting used to each other is the real subject.