Born in 1976 in Sarajevo, Aida Begic is a world-renowned film director and screenwriter. Aida Begic began her film education at the Sarajevo Academy of Performing Arts graduating in 2000. Her graduation film, The First Experience of Death, was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001 as an official selection of Cinefondation and won many awards worldwide. In 2003, he made another short film, North Went Mad, written and directed by Begic. Begic made his first feature film, Snow (Snijeg), in 2008. Snow won the Critics’ Week Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and went on to win numerous awards around the world and was nominated as Discovery of the Year in the European Film Academy’s Discovery section. In 2009, Begic founded the independent production company Film House while continuing to shoot films. In 2010, he wrote the script and directed his next film, Unutma Beni Istanbul.
In the same year, his name was included in Take 100, a book published by the prestigious Phaidon Publishing, which ranked the world’s most promising directors. Continuing to write and direct films, in 2012 Begiç premiered his second feature film Çocuklar (Djeca) at the Cannes Film Festival. At the festival, it received the special jury prize in the official selection of the Un Certain Regard Awards. Begic has also contributed to some important projects. He wrote and directed the short film Album, part of the film anthology Bridges of Sarajevo (Mostovi Sarajeva), which premiered in the official selection of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival as part of the Special Screening program.
Another important work is the feature-length documentary film The House of One Hundred Thousand Dollars (Kuća Od 100 Miliona Dolara), which she produced. Aida Begic’s first two films, Snow (Snijeg, 2008) and Children (Djeca, 2012), were about social life in Bosnia after the war and the struggle of survivors In his film Don’t Leave Me, he tells the story of three children who want to escape from the orphanage where they live in Urfa and dream of a better life (YÜKSEL, 2020). As the director has stated in his interviews, “Don’t Leave Me” is seen as the last part of a trilogy that began with “Snow and Children”. Thematically and stylistically, “Don’t Leave Me” bears kinship with the previous two films, in a sense completing or confirming the promise of the previous films.
Begic’s last film Ballad focuses on a different and more entertaining field than his previous films. While Begic’s earlier films usually focused on war and post-war life, Ballad presented a different genre to the audience. In an interview Begic said, “We force people in Bosnia to watch their own lives on the screen. Begiç said in an interview, pointing out that this movie is different from his other films. The plot of the movie is about a woman whose marriage is failing and she returns to her mother’s house and starts her acting journey. Begic, who has received awards at important film festivals such as Sarajevo, Cannes, and Pesaro, currently teaches at the Academy of Performing Arts at the University of Sarajevo in the undergraduate and graduate programs and is also the head of the Directing Department.
References
Yüksel, A. H. (2020, July 30). Aida Begiç’ten hayatta kalanlar üçlemesi. Nihayet. https://www.gzt.com/nihayet/aida-begicten-hayatta-kalanlar-uclemesi-3529565
