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.