D'une promesse qui n'a pas lieu (Sarajevo)

In 1998, I accompanied my father as he took up his post as a diplomat in Sarajevo. We set off by car and crossed Europe, from Paris to Sarajevo. The film recounts this journey, the relationship between son and father, and Bosnia still in ruins.

“Yet I was sticked to your back. I had to see through you, see you looking at this, this world. It was as if, thanks to the memory of your walking body, there was something in Sirmione, in Verona and later in Sarajevo that would tell me what was really going on. About what you and I might be looking for. I don’t know: it’s as if by constantly following you from here to there, by knowing you’re here and there, a wider arc takes shape. By following you through this beautiful and rich Europe to Sarajevo, to Mostar and Trebinje, it guaranteed that this was indeed the same world, and that from Paris to Sarajevo, via the high plateaux of the Andes where you were before, via Moscow and its suburbs where I went more recently, there was indeed the same continuity. And that the cause of fighting for distant people was definitely just. Yes, just, because these far-off places are ours, our loved ones. Because through you, through this back here and then there, I finally saw with my own eyes that man inhabits the same world and shares it.”