GRBAVICA (Jasmila Žbanić, Bosnia, 2006, 91 m.). THEME: POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER (WOMEN). SPOILER ALERT! Intimate, soulful story of Esma (Mirjana Karanovic), a single mother, and her 12 year old daughter Sara (Luna Mijovic). Set in the present in the seedy Grbavica district of Sarajevo, this film explores the far reaches of trauma in the Bosnian war: how the psychic wounds inflicted in that terrible time remain open and unhealed to this day. The film opens with the camera panning a dark, rich kilim rug behind the front credits, sweeping next over the faces of women lying on the rug, finally to a special face, a sweet, sad woman’s face, her eyes staring painfully straight into our own. Thus, in an instant, before any dialogue, we are engaged with this woman, riveted by her, and she interests us deeply from this first moment.
This sense of intense engagement prevails throughout this well told, well photographed narrative. We feel impelled to care about the reclusive, hesitant Esma, Sara, her saucy, spirited daughter, and the one man in the story, Pelda (Leon Lucev) who - although he is a gun toting thug like all the others we meet in the netherworld of Grbavica - is so much more: a devoted son to his shut-in aging mother and a respectful, tender suitor to Esma. Status among the kids hinges on whether their long dead fathers were sheheens – Bosnian loyalists who fought to the death, or the unspeakable alternative, bastards produced by the systematic rape of Bosnian women captured by the enemy in the Bosnian War, the Chetnik Serbs.
We visit a women’s trauma support group, conducted by the same social worker who also passes out subsistence grants. Esma only attends on the days when grants are issued, and she remains silent even then. But we know she’s disturbed. She startles visibly watching a butcher chop off the head of a fish. Twice at the nightclub where she works she is overcome watching a sexy Ukrainian waitress in an embrace with one of the owner’s thug buddies, and she must run to the bathroom to vomit or cry. Her private, silent avoidance of the painful memories of her own captivity is in the end intruded upon by Sara’s demands to know more about her father, and why it is that Esma cannot produce the customary document certifying that he was in fact a Bosnian soldier killed in action.
This is a bittersweet story, full of love between mother and daughter and silently suffered pain, teen infatuation, life on the mean streets, and, in the end, hope for a better future. Grbavica swept the film awards at the 2006 Berlin IFF: Winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film, Best Peace Film, and Special Ecumenical Jury Award. (In Serbo-Croatian) Grade: A-
This sense of intense engagement prevails throughout this well told, well photographed narrative. We feel impelled to care about the reclusive, hesitant Esma, Sara, her saucy, spirited daughter, and the one man in the story, Pelda (Leon Lucev) who - although he is a gun toting thug like all the others we meet in the netherworld of Grbavica - is so much more: a devoted son to his shut-in aging mother and a respectful, tender suitor to Esma. Status among the kids hinges on whether their long dead fathers were sheheens – Bosnian loyalists who fought to the death, or the unspeakable alternative, bastards produced by the systematic rape of Bosnian women captured by the enemy in the Bosnian War, the Chetnik Serbs.
We visit a women’s trauma support group, conducted by the same social worker who also passes out subsistence grants. Esma only attends on the days when grants are issued, and she remains silent even then. But we know she’s disturbed. She startles visibly watching a butcher chop off the head of a fish. Twice at the nightclub where she works she is overcome watching a sexy Ukrainian waitress in an embrace with one of the owner’s thug buddies, and she must run to the bathroom to vomit or cry. Her private, silent avoidance of the painful memories of her own captivity is in the end intruded upon by Sara’s demands to know more about her father, and why it is that Esma cannot produce the customary document certifying that he was in fact a Bosnian soldier killed in action.
This is a bittersweet story, full of love between mother and daughter and silently suffered pain, teen infatuation, life on the mean streets, and, in the end, hope for a better future. Grbavica swept the film awards at the 2006 Berlin IFF: Winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film, Best Peace Film, and Special Ecumenical Jury Award. (In Serbo-Croatian) Grade: A-
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