Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams

Esma lives in Sarajevo with her daughter Sara, works nights in a club and is trying to find the money for a school trip. The fee is waived for children of men killed as martyrs in the war, if a document is produced. Esma cannot produce it, and the whole film tightens around that one piece of bureaucracy. Jasmila Žbanić is telling the story of women systematically raped during the war without a single scene of war. Everything happens in the present: the sentences a mother chooses when talking to her daughter, the evaded glances, the silence still holding thirteen years on. It won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2006, and its effect ran well past the cinema. In the long campaign to have wartime rape survivors recognised as civilian victims of war, this film is repeatedly cited, and legal recognition arrived in stages over the years that followed. The difficulty is its pace. It is quiet, slow and refuses to steer you with music. Who it is for: anyone trying to understand the aftermath of the Bosnian war. Who it is not for: viewers expecting a light family drama.