“Othering” and Crossing the Divide in The Miner and Quo Vadis, Aida?

In his novel Yugoslavia, My Fatherland (Jugoslavija, moja dežela, 2013), Goran Vojnović writes that conflict never ends, it only passes down through generations. The Miner (Rudar, Hanna Slak, 2017) and Quo Vadis, Aida? (Jasmila Žbanić, 2020) follow the same logic. By questioning the broader concepts of border creation, border persistence and the act of crossing a border, the films delineate the layers of the division of humanity into hierarchically ordered and mutually conflicting subgroups. While their approach to the topic of mass killings is different, both films bear witness to multiple “otherings” – the perception of someone as different, something other than the “self”, as “the other”.

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