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Early in Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams, a film from Bosnia-Herzegovina, a woman tearfully recalls the day Serb soldiers stormed her Sarajevo home, ordering her and her family – whose faces she says she has now forgotten – to leave. She's part of a support group for women who lived through the mid-1990s genocide that killed at least 100,000 and displaced the better part of two million people. Another woman in the room suddenly gets a fit of the giggles. Strangely, the first woman keeps remembering and talking and crying, while the second woman's laughing fit gradually spreads through the room, until nearly all of victims are smiling and laughing through their grief.
The scene efficiently establishes the unsentimental yet hopeful tone of the picture, which is named for a Sarajevo neighborhood that became the site of a concentration camp during the 1992-95 conflict. The story is simple. Esma (Mirjana Karanovic) was a medical student before the war, but now she's just a weary 40-something single mother trying to scrape together enough cash to pay for her 12-year-old daughter's upcoming class trip. An uneasy peace has settled over her city: snipers no longer target civilians in public squares, but jobs are scarce, crime pervasive, and anyone out of their teens remembers how easily their once-secure urban existence can slide into bedlam.
Unable to make ends meet on government relief checks, Esma takes a job waiting tables at a dodgy nightclub, leaving her exhausted during the day and straining her relationship with Sara. The union is further tested when Sara catches the eye of a boy at school whose father was a "shaheed," a Muslim martyred in the war, as Sara has been told her father was. The boy proudly tells Sara of his father's heroic death, but when she can't tell of her own father's killing in similarly reverent detail, troubling questions emerge.
The scenario is standard, well-tread family drama, but the setting is everything: Sarajevo is a city haunted by war. Neighbors speak matter-of-factly about the excavation of mass graves that may at last allow them to identify the remains of their loved ones, and even outwardly resilient people, like Esma, carry deep psychological scars. The stakes feel desperately high precisely because they are so refreshingly human-scale: Will Esma be abused at her new job? Will she find the money for Sara's trip? Can we trust the bouncer that Esma has befriended at work?
It is a tribute to the strength of the performances, and to first-time writer/director Jasmila Zbanic's crisp, observant storytelling, that we actually want answers to these questions. Both Karanovic and Luna Mijovic, making her acting debut as Sara, are spot-on. (Mijokic plays the only 12-year-old I can recall from any semi-recent film that actually seems 12 rather than twenty-two.) Although Grbavica runs only 90 minutes, it manages to feel unhurried, pausing to soak up tone and detail that create genuine sense of place, and the feeling that events, and life, are ongoing outside of what we see in the frame.
The film addresses the war in much the same way. While the characters seldom speak of it explicitly, you feel its continuing influence on their destinies in every scene. The shot of Esma's face when a group of her fellow bus passengers break into a song she recalls from her youth tells us everything we need to know about what trials both extraordinary (war) and ordinary (age) have cost her. Likewise, when Esma sees things at her nightclub job that conjure memories of what she endured in the war, we don't, contrary to studio-movie convention, need to see flashbacks of what she's remembering. We see her face, and it's enough.
Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams opens at E Street Cinema on April 13 and plays for one week only.
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Go to Sarajevo. Everyone needs to go, and sooner rather than later. Go before it turns into Prague. Go before the Sarajevo roses disappear in new paving stones, and you can't find anything. Go to remember.