Sarajevo on film 2006 Bosnia and Herzegovina
Grbavica — The Land of My Dreams
The film is named for a real Sarajevo neighbourhood — one the war turned into a byword for its crimes. It won the Golden Bear, the first Bosnian feature to do so.
- Director
- Jasmila Žbanić
- Year
- 2006
- Runtime
- 90 minutes
- Language
- Bosnian
- Country
- Bosnia and Herzegovina
- Genre
- drama
The title of Grbavica is a place name, and the film insists you know it. Grbavica is a real Sarajevo neighbourhood on the south bank of the Miljacka — during the siege it was on the front line, and in the war’s aftermath it became shorthand for the crimes committed there. Jasmila Žbanić, a Sarajevan who lived through the war, set her film in that place and named it without comment. The audience is expected to know the weight of the name.
The story is the aftermath. Esma is a single mother working nights in a bar to keep her teenage daughter Sara in school and in a school trip the family cannot afford. The trip needs a father’s signature. Esma has no father to give her — and the film’s second half is the slow, painful accounting of why. Grbavica is not a film about the siege itself; it is about what the siege leaves behind, in one apartment, ten years on. Its subject is the war’s long tail: the survivors who do not get to move on, and the children who do not know what they are carrying.
The film won the Golden Bear at the 2006 Berlin Film Festival — the first Bosnian feature to take the prize — and put Žbanić, already one of the city’s most important directors, on the international map. It is the rare Sarajevo film that tells you more about the city as it is now than as it was: the same streets, the tram, the neighbourhood cafés, the ordinary damage.
For a visitor, Grbavica is the film to watch after the Sarajevo Roses and the museums of the siege. The memorials tell you what happened. This film tells you what happened next.
Critical reception
Grbavica won the Golden Bear at the 2006 Berlin Film Festival — the first Bosnian feature to do so — and was Bosnia and Herzegovina’s entry for the 79th Academy Awards. Critics were near-unanimous: it holds a 98% Tomatometer and a Metacritic score of 71.
Public reception and legacy
Grbavica holds a 98% critics’ and 86% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and the Golden Bear made Žbanić — with her debut feature — a global name. Its worldwide box office was modest, under $900,000, but its reach was out of all proportion to its run. Žbanić has said the film was about the women systematically raped during the war, and the title, a real neighbourhood, is still the name of one of the most traumatised districts in the city.
What the critics said
“This is a smart, moving film, and ultimately optimistic. Hate may have the questions, but love has the answer.”
“Throughout 'Grbavica' the desire to forget and the need to remember are at loggerheads.”Read the review →