Aida, Bosnian War’s First Child Casualty, Remembered on Screen

"From that moment on, and for a long time after that, I did not know what was light or what was dark, with whom I was speaking or what I was doing, it was all mechanical," says Fahrudin Kucuk in the documentary film 'Lakonoga' ('Light-Footed'), which is dedicated to his daughter, Aida, the first child to be killed in Sarajevo at the beginning of 1992-95 Bosnian war.

Aida, aged five at the time, was killed on May 2, 1992, the day the war officially started, as Sarajevo came under heavy artillery attack, although the siege of the city began the month before.

A total of 1,601 boys and girls lost their lives during the siege, but so far the Bosnian state prosecution has not filed a single indictment for the killing and wounding of thousands of people in the city.

One of the first shells exploded in a building in the Grbavica neighbourhood, and the shrapnel took Aida's life. Today, she would have been 33 years old.

The film, which focuses on her father Fahrudin Kucuk, an author of children's books, was made by Lejla Zvizdic, a Bosnian journalist and TV host at state broadcaster BHRT. It will be premiered in Sarajevo on Sunday.

"I always perceived Fahrudin as a great playful child, dedicated to children's literature, without even being aware of the cause-effect connection of trauma and creativity… that the background of this colourful world he creates today is such tragedy and trauma," Zvizdic told BIRN.

Zvizdic explained that she was intrigued as a human, as a mother, as a child of besieged Sarajevo, and as a director. "In this particular order," she added.

The film itself is a story about facing the past, how painful that process is, but also how tragedy can be source of hope and new energy for better things to come. In this...