The Cellist of Sarajevo

Sarajevo: a city under siege. As the mortars fall and the snipers conduct their deadly chess manoeuvres, a cellist sits at his window. The piece he plays, Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor, is all that restores his hope, at least for a time. On this day a bomb falls on the street below him, killing twenty-two people waiting in line to buy bread. For the next twenty-two days he will carry his cello into the cratered street at four each afternoon and play the Adagio in memory of the dead. The Cellist of Sarajevo imagines those twenty-two days through the eyes of three of its citizens. Kenan Scaron;imunović, who sets out every few days to fill containers with water for his family, with no idea whether he will return home. Dragan Isović, who longs to be reunited with the wife and son he smuggled out of the city months earlier. Arrow, a crack 'counter-sniper' too nimble and skilful to be killed by the besiegers in the hills, who is assigned the job of keeping the cellist alive. Exquisite and profoundly moving, The Cellist of Sarajevo gives life to the suffering, cruelty, courage and endurance of a broken city. It is a story about survival in a time of war, about honouring the dead while struggling to stay alive, about the temptation to hate and the refusal to do so, about the power of music to shape our humanity.