Original Title: Hope Hotel Phantom

Year: 2023

Length: 22 min

Country: Bosnia and Herzegovina, USA
Film Category: Short Documentary

Cast & Credits

Director: Bojan Stojčić

Script: Bojan Stojčić

Camera: Bojan Stojčić

Editor: Bojan Stojčić, Midhat Mujkić

Producer: Bojan Stojčić

Film Synopsis:

In November 1995, the leaders of Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia & Serbia met in Dayton (Ohio) to broker a peace agreement that would end four violent years of war in Bosnia & Herzegovina. Negotiated at the Hope Hotel located on the grounds of the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the Dayton Agreement locked Bosnia & Herzegovina into a simulacra of democracy, through the proxy of a site that was a simulacra in itself: a military base on the other side of the world, an intimidation to the signing parties.

27 years later, in July 2022, the filmmaker flew to America from BiH and booked himself a room at the Hope Hotel. There, he filled the same beds & conference halls as the people who had once shaped his future — a phantom in the echoes of this historical event: a dream turned nightmare.

Director's Biography

Bojan Stojčić (1988) is a visual artist from Bosnia and Herzegovina. More recent solo exhibitions were held at Oloman Next Door Gallery in Detroit (2022), AK Gallery in Koprivnica (2022), Art Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina (2020), and the last group exhibitions at which he exhibited include the Graphic Triennial in Tallinn (2022) , Cité internationale des arts in Paris (2021) and Slavs and Tatars' Pickle Bar in Berlin (2021). With his multimedia works, he addresses the autocolonial discourse and affect in the meta-Yugoslav space, questioning the collective and individual view of the peripheral Other and himself. The lived experience of war in his earliest childhood strongly informs Stojčić's artistic expression. Shaped by intense experiences of loss, absence, displacement and transition, both in public and private life, Stojčić positions himself as a European peripheral subject and conquers and subverts that position. Expressing himself through humor, poetics and geopolitics, he explores the traces and transformations of the present. He lives and works in Sarajevo.