Revisiting a War Once Left Behind

Or a father killing his son.

"You're going to find things out about yourself that you didn't think you were capable of," Mehmedinovic said. "There's a side of you that's reason, and there's a side of you that's animal." When order disappears and raw impulse takes over, he said, "you can decide to do something useful with it or something destructive."

His own father, Semezdin Mehmedinovic, wrote the highly acclaimed "Sarajevo Blues," published in the United States in 1998. But once the family members moved to Falls Church (via Phoenix and the District), they almost never discussed the war.

"He didn't want to talk about it," the elder Mehmedinovic said of his son. "He wanted in some way to forget. So it's strange, in a way, how he started to think about it. I think in some way he wants to solve these issues of the war . . . and I think he needs to do that, to go through that."

Mehmedinovic's father said he admired the way his son had taken on a sensitive subject in Bosnia, addressing ethnic strife without taking sides. "I'm proud of his moral stand, the way he decided to talk about personal lives and not about the ideological problems."

Meeting her son last week at an Old Town coffee shop, Sanja Mehmedinovic spoke of friends who died during the war and how it felt to see her child's hair go gray from stress.

"Children 8 to 12, they are just out and they see everything and they smell everything," she said. "He grew overnight into a man. He was never a child. He was never 13, 15, any of these things."

Mehmedinovic has not been back to Sarajevo, but he said many people he knows there have not fared well. "A lot of people I went to first, second and third grade with, they're pretty much, like, sniffing glue right now. A lot of Bosnian refugees I met in the U.S. are really crushed. They're mentally deteriorated."

For him, drawing comics as grenades exploded nearby helped deflect the war's horrors. His main character, a soldier whose name roughly translates to Old Cat, fought evil and triumphed every time. Like the Mehmedinovics, the soldier character moved to the United States after the war, retiring in Phoenix.

Filmmaking serves the same purpose as drawing, he said, giving the most painful memories a positive outlet.

"It's a need to testify," he said. "And it's a way of not being angry."