2025 | Historic Berlinale Debuts

Grbavica - Jasmila Žbanić

The Bosnian non-professional actress Luna Mijović and the Serbian actress Mirjana Karanović shine in Jasmila Žbanić's feature film debut Grbavica, which shapes the festival edition at the 56th Berlinale

Surprises are integral to the special dynamic of film festivals. In 2006, when a previously unknown director from Bosnia and Herzegovina receives the Golden Bear for her debut feature film, this is exactly what comes to pass: Jasmila Žbanić’s Grbavica has a lasting impact on the festival year and also receives the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury as well as the Peace Film Award and is an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film. Her Berlinale triumph introduces the 31-year-old director as a key political filmmaker and, at the same time, provokes extreme reactions from radical Serbs. Grbavica is about the systematic rape of Bosnian women during the Bosnian War and the struggle to cope with war trauma. The success of the film brings greater visibility and support for the 20,000 rape victims of this war.

Berlinale 2006: The International Jury presents Jasmila Žbanić with the main prize of the festival, the Golden Bear for the Best Film, for her debut film Grbavica

Jasmila Žbanić’s film tells the story of Esma who has a warm but also strained relationship with her twelve-year-old daughter, Sara. Esma lives in Grbavica, a district of Sarajevo. She continuously tries to convince Sara that her late father was a war hero. But one day, Sara begins to doubt this story – and eventually angrily confronts her mother. The deeply painful truth emerges: after Esma was raped in a prisoner of war camp, she was forced to give birth to Sara. This confession is the first step towards Esma naming her trauma and maybe finally starting to come to terms with it.

Influenced by the documentary genre, Jasmila Žbanić tells the moving story of Esma and Sara in a subtle and straightforward way, supported by the calm, unobtrusive camera work of the cinematographer Christine A. Maier. The director gives her two outstanding protagonists, the Serbian actress Mirjana Karanović and the Bosnian non-professional actress Luna Mijović, plenty of room to explore the emotional extremes of their characters as they swerve between love and deeply rooted shame – and to unearth the monstrous truth layer by layer.

After studying directing in her hometown of Sarajevo, Jasmila Žbanić begins her work as a director by making short and documentary films. After Grbavica, she continues to establish herself as a socio-political filmmaker. She remains true to the documentary form with Jedan dan u Sarajevu (One Day in Sarajevo, 2014) and U zraku (Airborne, 2019). After the summer comedy Love Island (2014), she creates another milestone in contemporary political cinema with Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020). This feature film, which is invited to screen in competition at the Venice International Film Festival, once again digs deep into the recent history of the director’s homeland and tells of the Srebrenica massacre, in which 8,000 civilians were murdered and buried in mass graves. The film wins numerous prizes, including the 2021 European Film Awards for European Film, European Director and European Actress.

62th Berlinale, 2012: The two directors, Angelina Jolie and Jasmila Žbanić, in conversation after the screening of In the Land of Blood and Honey

After her 2006 debut, Jasmila Žbanić regularly returns to the Berlinale. In 2007, she is a guest at Berlinale Talents; in 2010, her work is once again selected for the Competition with Na putu, a film about the influence fundamentalist beliefs are having on Europe. In 2012, she takes part in a panel discussion with Angelina Jolie at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. In terms of subject matter, the two women are very close: with In the Land of Blood and Honey, the American director portrays the horrors of the Yugoslavian civil war in the 1990s. Žbanić’s short film Crvene gumene čizme, presented out of competition in Berlinale Shorts in 2019, depicts the story of a mother searching for the remains of her two children who were abducted and killed by the Serbian army during the Bosnian War. Žbanić’s most recent appearance at the Berlinale is in 2021 – as a member of the International Jury.

More on Jasmila Žbanić can be found in the archive