THE DIARIES OF MY FATHER by Ado Hasanović

The screening will be preceded at 6:00 pm by a meeting with the director open to the public (free admission) that will take place in the Great Hall of the Vespucci-Colombo Institute, piazza Vigo, 1. Presented by Elena Franchini.

The initiative is organized by the Franco Serantini Library Institute of Social History, Resistance, and Contemporary Age of the province of Pisa, in collaboration with the Vespucci-Colombo Library, under the patronage of the Tuscan section of Amnesty International and the technical support of the Fi-Pi-Li Horror Festival in Livorno.

It is August 1993 when Bekir Hasanović exchanges a gold coin for the video camera with which, from that moment on, he will film everyday life in Srebrenica. The images he captures during the days of war with his improvised crew – consisting of Ben, John & Boys – give life to the unexpected portrait of a lost population, but one that maintains a strong connection with reality without giving up the right dose of humor. Ado, Bekir’s son, starts from these images and from his father’s diary pages to reconstruct his figure and to understand, together with his mother Fatima, how he managed to survive the Death March and the Srebrenica genocide.

Director Ado Hasanović said “My Father’s Diaries, is a meta-documentary about my struggles in trying to talk about and with my father. That’s why the images are raw and abrasive. The story is told in first person, as if writing a diary: the difficulty of finding a way to communicate with my father, his terrible memories and the sense of gratitude of having survived.”

Ado Hasanović (born in 1986 in Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, former Yugoslavia) is a Bosnian filmmaker, former participant of Berlinale Talents Sarajevo, graduated in Directing from the Sarajevo Film Academy and the Experimental Center of Cinematography in Rome.

His short films, including The Angel of Srebrenica (2010), Mama (2013), Pink Elephant (2017), Nomophobia (2018), and Let There Be Color (2020), have been selected and awarded in various international festivals. His first feature-length documentary, My Father’s Diaries (2023), produced by Palomar (Italy) and Mediawan (France), was recently premiered at Visions Du Réel; in 2024, it won the Jury Prize for Best Documentary and the Audience Award at the 21st edition of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival (BHFF), held in New York.