Grbavica: Land of My Dreams

Portrayals of genocide and mass murder victims are so frequent in modern media that our memory and compassion has grown short-lived. Today, we are concerned for the victims of Darfur and the women of Afghanistan, but who remembers the Bosnian war crimes?

Writer-director Jasmila Zbanic’s first film, “Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams,” was nominated for the Sundance Film Festival and awarded the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival. Zbanic, a 32-year-old Bosnian, tells the story of her struggling country in the aftermath of the war. Esma (Mirjana Karanovic), one of the tens of thousands of rape victims from the Bosnian war, is trying to make ends meet in the eponymous suburb of Sarajevo, with her pre-teen daughter Sara (Luna Mijovic).

Zbanic’s clear storytelling makes the film accessible to a global audience; you do not need to know about shaheeds or Bosnian war camps to empathize with the middle-aged mother working night shifts at a seedy club in order to support her daughter. Zbanic believes that simplicity will triumph. Indeed, she does not preach through her characters, but rather lets the message float to the surface by the end of the film, aided by a bemoaning song about Sarajevo.

The film focuses on the relationship of the single mother and daughter: Esma needs to pay Sara’s imminent school trip fees—a whopping sum of 200 euros—and we see her become increasingly more embarrassed as she asks each of the film’s characters for help. Tension escalates to a fever pitch as Sara questions the identity of her father while the school trip looms nearer.

The past is a context, rather than a subject, for the film: Zbanic does not resort to graphic violence in order to hint at the atrocities of the war. We see it reflected in the women’s lined faces and the men’s gruffness. We hear about it in songs sung in the school bus and learnt at home—the English title of the film is a line from a song about war-torn Bosnia. The well-used pick-up line “Where have I seen you before?” gets the morbid and somewhat unexpected answer: “At postmortem identifications.” Sara and her boyfriend first bond over the death of their fathers.

However, all is not drenched in the drama and pain of the past: Esma and Sara rough-tumble in their pajamas, Sara throws her babysitter’s purse out the window, and Esma and her friend Sabina giggle like the schoolgirls they are. The human element here is more important than the didactic war message.

Mirjana Karanovic’s acting as Esma is poignant in its clear-eyed honesty and, again, simplicity. A veteran from popular Bosnian director Emir Kusturica’s films and a national star in the country, Karanovic plays Esma without pretension, as a woman straining to forget the past and bravely face the present.

Luna Mijovic, a debuting actress, plays Sara with surprising freshness and frankness. The relationship between Esma and Sara is captured with success: Sara’s possessiveness and blooming teenage dark spells and her mother’s struggle at authority and obedience are themes that are not altogether easy to portray, but come across lucidly.

As much as people may cringe to think of sitting through a painful two-hour political message, the acting in the film makes you forget that worry as soon as you see Esma and Sara in their sunlit apartment.

Yet the general subject matter of the film has been conjugated many times over: as fresh as the acting and as heart-felt as the directing may be, there are too many films about single mothers with difficult daughters and financial situations for this one to be called unique.

—Anna I. Polonyi can be reached at apolonyi@fas.harvard.edu.