Grbavica

Grbavica, The Movie

Grbavica is not a movie about war, exactly, but about the aftermath of war. It follows the path of a woman and her daughter who are trying to continue on with life after the Balkan War has come to a close. Grbavica, the movie, is set in the nineteen-nineties in Bosnia. The woman is alone in the land to raise her twelve-year-old daughter, and she has to do it under the shadow of the past war and the xenophobia and other cultural differences that it has stirred up. Even the mundane activities of daily life, things like school trips, become very important when set against this backdrop.

Esma and her daughter Sara's financial troubles are very real in the movie, offering an insight into how life really was for those left alive after a terrible war ended. Sara wants to go on a school trip that her mother cannot afford to pay for. She could provide a certificate that shows in full how Sara's father was a war hero, and she would then be given a discount, but she wants to pay the full price and tries to figure out a way to do this on her own even with all of the other costs of living that the pair have to deal with day after day. This is because she holds a secret about Sara's father that she does not want to give out, and it goes along with the war.

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The movie has not received all rave reviews, though many people do seem to like it quite a lot. One thing that it really has going in its favor is that people say it is very true to the country and the time. It really shows what life was like at that place and in that time. This is something that people who were not there cannot possibly understand, so it shows the rest of the world a little bit about the struggles in Bosnia. In this way it is very eye-opening and can really provide people with information about a situation that they may not have considered before.

Another bit of praise that the movie has gotten is that it manages to capture the feeling of a war without resorting to violence. Many other war movies have shown the intense violence of warfare in order to expose the audience to this shock. Grbavica does not do this, but it still does not come across as being fake. It may not show the experiences of the soldiers, but it shows the experiences that most people -- for most people are common civilians like Esma and Sara -- can really connect with.

The main criticism of the movie is that some of the subplots were not needed. They seem to have been added into the film in order to make it longer, when that time could have been cut or spent in another way. The subplots detract a bit from the flow, but they do not ruin the film by any means.