Over the past several weeks, HBO has been putting together the cast and crew that will bring the incredibly popular video game franchise, “The Last of Us,” to life. And while video game fans are probably excited just from knowing that the premium network is going to do a big-budget adaptation, film and TV fans that have little interest in the game will be jazzed by the most recent announcement of two directors that will helm episodes of the series.

Continue reading Acclaimed Directors Jasmila Žbanić & Ali Abbasi To Direct HBO’s ‘The Last Of Us’ TV Series at The Playlist.

Teacher-turned-indispensable-interpreter, Aida (Jasna Djuricic), runs around a crowded United Nations base relaying messages amid a humanitarian crisis on the brink of devolving into an unspeakable catastrophe. More importantly, she is a mother vehemently trying to wield whatever little influence she has to ensure her sons and husband survive, in Jasmila Zbanic’s “Quo Vadis, Aida?”

The historical backdrop is July 1995 in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica just after the Serb army seized it, but right before they proceeded to carry out a highly premeditated genocide against the locals under the orders of General Mladic (Boris Isakovic)—depicted here as a villain trying, but failing, to wear the cloak of diplomacy to hide the cruelest of intentions.

Continue reading ‘Quo Vadis, Aida?’: Jasmila Zbanic’s Bosnian Drama Is A High Wire Act Of Immense Tension & Devastating Humanism [Review] at The Playlist.

It will come as a surprise to many reading this, but the Nazis were not the only perpetrators of genocide on the European continent in the 20th Century. During the Bosnian War (1992-1995) there was an ethnic cleansing campaign by the Bosnian Serb Army. Their largest single atrocity occurred toward the end of the conflict in an event referred to now as the Srebrenica Massacre. An event where over 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were brutally killed.

Continue reading Jasmila Žbanić Revisits The Already Forgotten Horrors Of The Bosnian War In ‘Quo Vadis, Aida?’ [Interview] at The Playlist.