Some Memories

The History Museum of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo was built during the period of Yugoslavian socialism. Since the end of the Yugoslav war, nobody feels responsible for it anymore – with the exception of a handful of people who are trying to keep the place alive. (Diagonale catalog 2024)

“Some memories – are stronger – than others.” With this motto, Lotte Schreiber begins her experimental documentary short film Some Memories, in which she takes a look behind the scenes of the Historijski Muzej Bosne i Hercegovine, the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, located in Sarajevo. Based on an interview with museum director Elma Hašimbegović, the origins, politics and not least, the architecture of the institution are placed in front of the analog camera lens and told via voiceover. The fact that since 1995, the end of the war, the institution has no longer had the status of a state-recognized museum – a failure of Bosnian-Herzegovinian cultural policy – does not prevent director Hašimbegović and her colleagues from carrying out the work of remembrance. Founded in 1945 as the “Museum of People’s Liberation”, today it serves primarily as a museum memorial intended to remind peacetime visitors of the wars in Sarajevo. Since 1963 the museum has been housed in its current building, which was designed by the architects Boris Magaš, Edo Šmidihen and Radovan Horvat in the style of Yugoslavian modernism.
As a trained architect, filmmaker and artist Lotte Schreiber knows that remembering can also be a nostalgic, emotionally charged act. Schreiber expresses this nostalgia in her film language. In the Super 8 footage she interweaves several layers of time. The symbolic red of Tito’s socialism is mixed in with the black-and-white film, both in the intertitles and the image details of a few color shots. The geometric rectilinearity of the modernist museum building is accompanied by Hašimbegović’s narrative voice, which describes the institution from its beginnings to the present day. She always uses the pronoun “we” to emphasize the collective work of the joint effort. Tito and Yugoslavia may be a thing of the past, but Schreiber shows that their memory lives on in the architecture and the people who use it. (Berina Musa) 

(Translation by John Wojtowicz)