A trip to Bosnia as a tourist keen to explore the famous Mehmed Pasa Sokolovic Bridge in Visegrad led theatre artist Kym Vercoe to an unexpected and harrowing journey of discovery.
In 2008 Vercoe, an ensemble artist with Sydney-based theatre company Version 1.0, went to the town of Visegrad on the River Drina in Bosnia-Herzegovina, about 20kms from the Serbian border, and stayed at Vilina Vlas Spa Resort on the recommendation of a tourist guidebook. Built in 1571, the bridge was the site of a number of killings during the 1992 Visegrad massacre and was made famous in Ivo Andric’s Nobel-prize winning book, The Bridge on the Drina. While Vercoe enjoyed her adventures, it was upon her return home that she discovered the dark past of Visegrad.
“I read The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric, which is a very famous book that won a Nobel prize. It’s basically a fictionalised history of the Balkans over 400 years … So I went to that town to see the bridge,” says Vercoe. She says her curiosity, as an Australian, to see such an ancient piece of history attracted her to the town.
Once back in Australia, it was during a quiet night at home sorting through photos of her trip when Vercoe discovered the appalling history of where she’d stayed after clicking on the Wikipedia link of the hotel.
To Vercoe’s shock, Vilina Vlas Spa Resort served as a rape camp during the Bosnian War in the 1990s where women were imprisoned, tortured and sexually assaulted, playing a large part in the ethnic cleansing of the population.
“My whole life has been different since that moment. It’s been an incredibly integral part of my life. I spent the rest of the evening trawling through the internet and discovered more broadly what happened in Visegrad,” she says.
“I was very, very upset at the time. I was so shocked. I was so aware of what had happened in Bosnia – the rape camps and the concentration camps – but it never occurred to me that the places where people were tortured and held were still standing. I had made such a bad assumption about that place.”
After discovering she had slept in a former rape camp, Vercoe was determined to reveal the truth and acknowledge the atrocities that had occurred against so many women, not so long ago, that had, until now, remained hidden. Deciding to do a small, 10-minute improvisation depicting the truth behind the hotel, which left many of her colleagues in tears, Vercoe decided to make a show out of it.
After going back to Bosnia to develop her idea, do more research and take video footage, in 2010 Vercoe went on to produce and perform in the theatre production, Seven Kilometres North-East. Drawing upon journal notes, Andric’s book and correspondence with guidebook directors, Vercoe sought to create a production that would function as a memorial for all the women – an accurate acknowledgement of what really happened.
“The driving force behind the show was the lack of memorial or monuments, the lack of acknowledgement that the town was so heavily ethically cleansed,” she says. “It was a big challenge; a very personal, solo journey. I didn’t want to interrogate people but go back with open eyes. In the end, I wanted to create some kind of memorial – not a form of protest but positive action.”
Vercoe’s show then went on to tour in Sarajevo where the response was “extraordinary”.
“A lot of them said I made them feel very proud, because a lot of the show is about my love for Bosnia. All the footage was very beautiful,” she says. “I talked about my love of the country, so it’s a bit of a love story too that had a really bad break up and it’s about figuring out how to reconcile that.”
Following the success of the theatre production in Sarajevo, Vercoe’s show caught the eye of Bosnian film director Jasmila Zbanic, who turned the show into a feature film called For Those Who Can Tell No Tales, which will make its debut at next month’s Toronto International Film Festival.
“I got an email from Jasmila and I laughed for a very, very long time,” Vercoe recalls. “Being an artist you become so pragmatic and realistic; you don’t expect these crazy adventures to happen. You never think this is going to happen.”
Two weeks after receiving the email from Zbanic, who was eager to make the movie as soon as possible, Vercoe was on a plane to Bosnia and began filming almost straight away.
“I’d done a number of short films [before] but this was absolutely the deep end – this was big!” Vercoe says of the film’s significance in her career and her life.
Describing the making of the film as an “extraordinary experience”, Vercoe hopes for Australian distribution of For Those Who Can Tell No Tales and is in talks about another film in the future – all while continuing her love of theatre with Version 1.0.