Esma's Secret

To be shown: 28 April 2008

Aus/Ger/Bos-Herz/Croatia/Neth 2006.
Director: Jasmila Zbanic.
Starring: Mirjana Karanovic, Luna Mijovic, Leon Lucev.
Certificate 15. 95 minutes.

Synopsis

Winner of the prestigious Golden Bear at the 2006 Berlin Film Festival, Jasmila Zbanic's directorial feature film debut is a powerful drama which focuses on the Balkan War's painful aftermath as experienced by a Bosnian woman, Esma, and her 12 year-old daughter Sara.
The film is set in Grbavica, a poor northern neighbourhood of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, where life is still being reconstructed after the war. Esma, a single mother, takes a job as a cocktail waitress in a night-club, being unable to make ends meet with the meagre government aid she receives. Working all night is difficult for her and also forces her to spend less time with her daughter. Haunted by violent events in her past, Esma also attends group therapy sessions in an attempt to exorcise her past. Her daughter Sara is a vivacious football mad tomboy, who develops a close friendship with classmate Samir. They are drawn together having both lost their fathers in the war - or so Sara was told by her mother. However, Sara questions this information when a school trip arises for which she can receive a discount by producing a certificate proving her father died a "shaheed" - a war martyr, and yet her mother seems unable to produce such a certificate. She becomes violently upset when classmates tease her for not being on the list of martyrs' children, and when she discovers that her mother has paid full price for the school trip a painful confrontation occurs.
Filmed in Sarajevo, the film burns the whole frightening war in former Yugoslavia into your head, and this without resorting to violent scenes. It is a film about the accomplishment of the war, the state of the country now, and the relationship between a mother and daughter. A moving and perceptive drama benefitting from outstanding performances from the 2 female leads.
Zbanic has said that her film is about "love, but a love that is not pure because it has been mixed with hate, disgust, trauma and despair". At times delicate, other times extremely powerful, this is an assured first feature from a promising talent.

Notes

Like many other productions in Bosnia, Esma's Secret was a small budget film.

Luna Mijovic (Sara) broke her leg when shooting the football scene!

This film won 3 awards at the 2006 Berlin International Film Festival, and the Grand Jury Prize at 2006 Sundance Film Festival.

Mirjana Karanovic gave an equally powerful and restrained performance in Kusturica's "Life Is A Miracle".

Jasmila Zbanic is a Bosnian writer-director. She lived just across from Grbavica during the war.

Grbavica was the centre of various brutal acts of ‘ethnic cleansing' visited on local non-Serbs and Muslims during the disastrous siege of the early '90s. The area was held under siege by the Serbo-Montenegram Army and transformed into a special war camp where the population was tortured.

Esma's Secret was Bosnia/Herzegovina's official entry at the 2007 Academy Awards, winning an Oscar.

Sara's friend Samir inherited a gun from his father, who was a shaheed. The gun plays an important role in the film's third act, which revolves around Esma's secret.

Grbavica reminds us that a war keeps affecting people's lives long after the guns have been put down, and even then guns can resurface in various forms.

Sarajevo has an annual Film Festival famous for being instigated, towards the end of the bloody siege in 1994, as a wonderful, cultural act of defiance. Thirteen years on, you're left in no doubt that you're in a city where movies really matter. Even more than London's, this is a people's film festival. With a population of about 300,000 or so, the six-figure attendance for the nine-day-long festivities of the once-besieged capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina – the biggest such festival in south-east Europe – seems all the more extraordinary.