La Biennale di Venezia - Torino 2008 World Design Capital - Board of Architects - UAV

Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Mission Title: A Bridge Over Troubled Waters – Stari Most in Mostar

Mission By: Enrico Cremagnani,

Mission Finished on Date: 26-05-2008

SCRIPT

Go to the city of Mostar.
Get good footage of the bridge, both on and off of it, and from many angles.
Try to capture how the city is different, if it’s different, on either side of the river. Try to find details in the buildings and the people that might highlight this difference, or sameness as the case may be.
Interview architect Amir Pasic, a professor and architect who spearheaded the rebuilding of the bridge and oversaw its construction. Ask him to show you documents relating to the rebuild (his famous postcard invitation, blueprints, etc.) get good footage of these.
If possible, interview people on either side of the bridge, it may be difficult, but do what you can.
Think of this documentary as an important essay documenting the scars of the most recent war in Europe.
Jumping from the bridge for centuries was a rite of passage for local youth, see if you can catch any of them making the plunge.

TRAVEL BAG

Can a bridge reconnect a divided city?

The most potent symbol of the Croatian attempt to erase Bosnia-Herzegovina from map came in the heat of the Yugoslav Wars, almost 15 years ago, when a couple of well-aimed Croatian artillery shells brought the city of Mostar’s Stari Most or Old Bridge, the gravity-defying masterpiece of Ottoman-designed architecture erected in 1566, crashing into the fast green waters of the Neretva river.

The bridge defined Mostar , which before interference had been the most integrated city in the region. Its obliteration seemed to augur the city's death. But after years of painstaking work and at a cost of €12 million, the Old Bridge stands again, a replica built of the same creamy local limestone, a graceful span arching 90ft (27 meters) across the ravine and suspended 60ft (18 meters) above the river’s banks.

Though the bridge reopened almost four years ago, it’s rarely used. The Croatian ethnic engineering was too successful. The two sides of the city, Bosniaks and Croats, rarely communicate except when forced to by political realities. Padddy Ashdown, the internationally appointed governor of the region at the time the bridge was rebuilt saw the bridge as more than span of stones crossing a river, but as a metaphorical bridge between Europeans and the Muslim world. Its destruction and use hints at the future of Muslims in Europe.

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