Plot
Single mother Esma lives with her 12-year-old daughter, Sara, in post-war Sarajevo. Sara wants to go on a school trip and Esma starts working as a waitress in a nightclub in order to earn the money. Sara makes friends with Samir, who, like Sara, has no father. Both of their fathers allegedly died as war heroes. Samir is surprised that Sara doesn’t know the circumstances of her father’s death. Samir’s own father was massacred by Chetniks near Žuč when he refused to leave the trench he was defending. And yet, whenever mother and daughter discuss this delicate topic, Esma’s responses are always vague. The situation becomes more complicated when the school offers to take pupils on the trip free of charge, provided they can furnish a certificate proving that they are the offspring of a war hero. Esma explains to Sara that her father’s corpse was never found and that she does not possess such a certificate. She promises to try to obtain the document. In reality she attempts to borrow the money Sara needs – from her friend, Sabina, from her aunt and from her boss. Sara can’t get rid of the nagging feeling that something’s not right. Shocked and bewildered when she discovers she is not mentioned as the child of a war hero on the list of pupils on the school trip, she lashes out at a classmate, explaining that her father was massacred on the front near Žuč when he refused to desert his trench. At home, however, she confronts her mother, demanding to know the truth. Esma breaks down and brutally reveals the painful facts: Esma was raped in a prisoner camp and forced to have the child that resulted from this violation. All at once, Sara realises that she is the child of a Chetnik. And yet, the knowledge also brings them a step closer to overcoming the trauma. In the end Sara leaves for a school trip, waving to Esma at the last moment. In the bus children are singing a popular song about Sarajevo ("Land of My Dreams"), and in the end Sara joins as well, and thus ends the film on a bright and optimistic note.
Read more about this topic: Grbavica (film)
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“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
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—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I’d read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers—especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)