Transparency of Evil

Years after having witnessed her father being murdered by a sniper during the siege of Sarajevo, Mila, a Bosnian-Serb refugee, gets a job as the assistant of Dr. Dabic. The man is a popular energy healer and charismatic who helps people with various afflictions. While Mila is very much taken by Dabic's kindness and unique talent, she soon starts suspecting that he is - in fact - a famous war criminal, the mastermind behind the genocide that claimed, among many others', her father’s life.

Director's statement
In 2008, when the news about the arrest of war criminal Radovan Karadzic took the world by surprise, I was living in Rio de Janeiro and had no idea how this story would change my life.

From that day on, I began a silent journey of research and information gathering that would lead me a year later to live in Europe. I wanted to understand the motivations that drove neighbors to kill each other in a bloody war, I wanted to know the political truth behind the atrocities, I wanted to know what it was like to live in a city that had been under bloody siege for three years. But more than that, being a writer and a poet myself, I wanted to understand the mind of Radovan Karadzic. How a poet could become a war criminal and then become a guru seen as a holy man by many.

As an artist, I have always been dedicated to leading the viewer to face the ugly and the absurd that reality often brings us. My intention is not to make a political film about Serbs & Muslims. My intention is to question our behavior as human beings, in the face of the everyday life decisions we make that can change the destiny of nations.

It is a story about survival, about what we feel is right and wrong, about the seemingly inextricable duality in each of us. It is a story about two characters coming from opposite sides of the same conflict - the perpetrator and the victim - who now need each other to survive. The film intends to show us how War is more inside than outside of ourselves.

Producer's statement
My encounter with Marcio-André de Sousa-Haz and his project was an obvious choice to me. The topic was fascinating. But what really triggered my interest was the fact that the main character was not the war criminal but Mila, victim of the war. She would be at the chore of the film - not him -, along with her eagerness to heal and to get a normal life back. Transparency of Evil is an ""easy"" on the essence of evil, making the audience wonder how a doctor, a poet could become one of the greatest perpetrators of genocide in the 20th century.

The fact that this story was to be told by a filmmaker from Brazil was the final straw that pulled me in. I was immediately confident that Marcio could grasp the intensity of this story - as a Brazilian, he is used to the knots and bolts of dictatorship, corruption and political unrest - without bearing the emotional weight of being from the Balkans.

We started working on the script in January 2021. As we speak, screenwriter Doruntina Basha, from Kosovo, just started working on the the script with Marcio. Her writing experience (Vera Dreams of the Sea, 2021) along with her life experience in the Balkans are a sure added-value to the project. The fact that she’s a woman is another asset for the development of Mila’s character and the development of the script altogether.
I am thrilled at the opportunity to share the film with you today as it is still in its writing stage.

Screenwriter's bio
Doruntina Basha is a screenwriter and playwright from Prishtina, Kosovo. She studied Playwriting at the Theater Department of the University of Prishtina. She holds an MA in European Humanities, with a focus on gender studies, from a consortium of Universities comprising of : University of St. Andrews, Università di Bergamo and Université de Perpignan Via Domitia. She works in her home country, as well as internationally, in theater, film and communication.

Director's bio
Márcio-André de Sousa-Haz is a filmmaker, writer, and visual artist born in Rio de Janeiro and living in Barcelona. He is the winner of the Medina Media Award for Best Director (Festival de Málaga 4K) for his film "Cozy for Two at Kuleshov St." His short "The First Time I Saw Francis Taylor He Was in Slow Motion" won twelve awards at international festivals, including best director and best movie. As a writer and artist, Sousa Haz’s texts have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Production company
Julie Arrue has worked in film production since 2001. For 10 years in the United States (Miramax, PBS) then in France at Cinétévé and Gaumont, she works on numerous award-winning feature films
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Constantly driven by the need to bring our existential questions and the singularity of our daily lives to light, she creates Cristal Films in 2018 to defend committed cinema with strong, sustained artistic standards. She surrounds herself with a solid team of women experts.