The Perfect Circle 1997

A Bosnian poet, Hamza, Mustafa Nadarević, lives with his family in Sarajevo during the horrific siege of the city in the early 1990s. The war rages around them as he strives to hold onto humanity and calm in the surrounding chaos.

His wife Gospođa, Jasna Diklić, and their daughter Miranda, Mirela Lambić, are sent to Croatia for safety, a fragile relief that comes with its own uncertainties. In the midst of this turmoil, Hamza opens his door to two orphans, Adis, Almedin Leleta, and Kerim, Almir Podgorica, who have escaped a massacre in their village and arrive in Sarajevo seeking an aunt who once lived in the Bistrik district. Hamza chooses to shelter the boys and offer them something they can cling to amid the storm: hope and a path forward.

After a long search, Hamza learns that the boys’ aunt has been airlifted to Germany, a revelation that reshapes their chances of reunion and presses the urgency of their situation. With time running out, Hamza decides to get the children out of the war zone, but the only viable route lies through the perilous Sarajevo International Airport, a corridor watched by Chetniks and death squads, where snipers linger in the shadows.

As they move to shelter from Serb shelling in a building, the dog that Adis and Kerim have adopted is shot by a soldier. Kerim responds with quick courage, killing two Serbs who advance toward Hamza and the boys. Outside, Hamza and Kerim reach the grim moment of finding Adis, who has died, and they carry him to the cemetery. The wooden headstone bears his name as Kerim carefully writes “Adis.”

Throughout many scenes, Hamza engages in long, intimate monologues with the two children, often gazing at photographs of his wife and daughter, weaving memory and longing into his verses. The film foregrounds these moments as a thread of humanity that persists amid the noise of war, underscored by the poetry Hamza cites. All the verses Hamza quotes are by Abdulah Sidran, a renowned Bosnian writer and poet whose 1993 Sarajevski tabut looms large in the city’s cultural memory.