World Premiere at WARM Festival 2025
WARM Festival 2025 is proud to host the world premiere of The Flowers of Srebrenica, a powerful new theatre production by SARTR – Sarajevo War Theatre, in collaboration with LegalAliens Theatre (UK) and the International Theatre Festival MESS.
Premiering in Sarajevo on July 9 and 10, 2025, as part of the WARM Festival’s official program, the play marks the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide. Inspired by the illustrated novel by Aidan Hehir, this international co-production brings together actors from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, Ukraine, and Ireland, blending physical theatre, animated projection, and personal testimony to ask urgent questions about memory, justice, and collective responsibility.
LegalAliens Theatre is a London-based company led by migrants, widely recognized for their work with refugee and migrant artists. Their projects explore themes of displacement, identity, and justice. In developing The Flowers of Srebrenica, the company did not aim to “retell the war in the Balkans”, a task that rightly belongs to those who lived through it. Instead, they asked: what can the world learn from Srebrenica, thirty years on? And if stories are not shared, what are the consequences? This is not a play that points fingers. This is a play about what it means to remember.
At its core lies a simple question: what does it mean to remember? Is memory a monument, a grave, a photograph, or can it become an act of solidarity, carried not just by survivors but by all of us?
Told through the voices of a chorus of women – who do not belong to a single place or time, but act as guardians of memory – the story revisits and reinterprets the journey of an Irish professor traveling from Sarajevo to the Srebrenica Memorial Centre. These women interrupt, question, and guide the narrative, creating a poetic, political, and visually striking meditation on loss, accountability, and resistance.
The cast includes Selma Alispahić (SARTR), Taz Munyaneza, Valeria Pogolsha, Edin Suljic, and Cillian O’Donnchadha. The production is directed by Lara Parmiani.
As SARTR’s director Maja Salkić notes, the play aims to speak not only to local audiences but to the world. It addresses younger generations, many of whom were not born during the war. inviting them to reflect on Srebrenica as both a historical wound and a warning. It is a reminder that theatre, in its essence, is a place to learn empathy and resist forgetting.
Following its Sarajevo premiere, The Flowers of Srebrenica will tour Tuzla, Belgrade, London, Oslo, Pisa, and other European cities in autumn 2025.
The performances at WARM Festival will take place at SARTR on:
9 July 2025 at 8:00 PM
10 July 2025 at 1:00 PM and 8:00 PM
Tickets: www.karter.ba
WARM Festival is honored to include The Flowers of Srebrenica in its official program and to stand alongside our partners in telling this important story.
