Sarajevo on film 2010 Bosnia and Herzegovina
On the Path (Na putu)
Jasmila Žbanić's third film — a Sarajevo flight attendant and her tram-driver partner, and the radicalisation that enters their ordinary city life.
- Director
- Jasmila Žbanić
- Year
- 2010
- Language
- Bosnian
- Country
- Bosnia and Herzegovina
- Genre
- drama
On the Path (Na putu) is Jasmila Žbanić’s third feature, and it is set firmly in the contemporary city she has made her subject. Luna, a flight attendant, and Amar, who drives the city tram, are an ordinary young Sarajevo couple — until Amar’s friendship with a religious radical begins to pull him toward a stricter, separate life. The film is about the slow damage that does to their relationship and to Luna’s sense of her own city: the neighbourhood, the job, the ordinary streets that begin to feel like they belong to someone else.
It is the third panel in Žbanić’s portrait of post-war Sarajevo, after Grbavica and before Quo Vadis, Aida? — the same director’s Golden Bear winner about the war’s aftermath, and her Oscar-nominated film about Srebrenica. On the Path was screened in competition at the 60th Berlin Film Festival and won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Yerevan festival.
For a visitor, it is the film of the contemporary city rather than the memorial one: the trams, the cafés, the specific texture of Sarajevo life twenty years after the war, and the quiet way the city’s own tensions press on ordinary people. Watch it after the war films, and Sarajevo appears as a place that went on living.
Critical reception
On the Path screened in competition at the 60th Berlin Film Festival and won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Golden Apricot festival in Yerevan. English-language reviews are scarce — Rotten Tomatoes lists none — but the German and Bosnian critics who did review it praised the film’s refusal to pass judgement on its characters.
Public reception and legacy
At home the film was a genuine event: in its first week it drew about 30,000 viewers across Bosnia and Croatia — 24,880 in Bosnia alone — and was the most-watched domestic film in Croatia that year. The Bosnian director Haris Pašović called it a masterpiece of 21st-century film art. It holds a 63% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
What the critics said
“"stets aber bleibt er nah dran an seinen beiden Helden, ohne sie zu verurteilen oder zu verraten" ("it always stays close to its two heroes without condemning or betraying them")”