few months ago I was introduced to a Bosnian man at a party. He heard I was making a movie and wanted to know more. I told him that it was about my hometown of Banja Luka and what really happened there during the war. He snickered and said,“What happened? War happened and that’s all. Not much to discuss.” I wondered if that was really the truth.

When I left my hometown of Banja Luka, Bosnia, in spring of 1992, I believed I was coming back that fall. None of us believed the war could last longer than that. Not in Bosnia, where there were so many mixed marriages, so many kids who belonged to neither religion. I did not say goodbye to my friends, or to my city. I left believing I was coming back.

In December of 2003, after 11 years of living as a foreigner, a refugee, an outcast, I faced my city again. I found myself walking through it, looking at the people, at the buildings, in utter shock. The city I remembered, the city I called my own, was no longer there. It was dead and rotting away. And all the anger, bitterness, disappointment and pain that I had kept inside of me all these years, came out.

When my father said that he needed to go to Banja Luka last summer I knew I had to go with him. It was to be his first trip back since he left in 1995. The three years of his life in occupied Banja Luka during the war had remained a mystery all these years. When he finally came to America, he said that the past was not to be talked about. The only way to survive in this new life was to forget the old. And we were all happy to oblige.