03/07/2006

Brussels’ European Film Festival opened this weekend with the screening of this year’s Golden Bear winner at the Berlin Film Festival: Grbavica [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Barbara Albert
interview: Jasmila Zbanic
film profile] by Bosnian director Jasmila Zbanic (see news of February 21 and March 8).

Named after an area in Sarajevo as seen through the eyes of a woman, wonderfully played by Mirjana Karanovic, the film paints a portrait of a city, a people and its suffering; a city still coping with the trauma of a very recent war.

A drama about roots, Zbanic’s debut feature depicts a week in the life of Esma, a single mother who makes several sacrifices so that her daughter Sara, whose father died a war martyr, can eat her favourite fish or go on a school outing. While Esma dithers in supplying the document proving the death of Sara’s father, which will allow her to go on a free trip with her classmates, the young teenager wonders about her absent father, who is never mentioned. The truth of his whereabouts is revealed to her quite brutally when Esma finally gives in.

In filming a grey and war-torn city, Esma’s small jobs, the economic devastation of Sarajevo, its small criminal underworld and fatherless teenagers, Zbanic successfully avoids falling into the melodrama trap, to offer the audience the multiple facets of war, pain and mourning and – towards the end of this poignant tale – maternal love and the struggle between life and death that exists in the private lives of those who do survive.

Produced by German outfit Coop 99, in co-production with Bosnia’s Noirfilm Filmproduktion and Hungary’s Karlsruhe Jadran, the film will be released in Belgium by Abc Distribution.

International sales are being handled by The Match Factory

(Translated from French)