Politics & Power Quote by Jasmila Žbanić

A nation, Žbanić suggests, isn’t a solid object you can hold up to the light; it’s a story you’re asked to believe in, with a cast, a script, and a carefully edited timeline. Coming from a director best known for films shaped by Bosnia’s war and its aftermath, the line lands less like a clever provocation and more like a lived diagnosis: she’s watched how flags and anthems can overwrite bodies, how bureaucratic borders can outlast trauma, how “us” and “them” are manufactured with the same ruthless efficiency as propaganda cinema.

The comparison to a feature film is pointed because film is already the art of selective reality: framing, cutting, scoring, deciding what the audience must not see. Nations do the same work at scale. They turn messy histories into origin myths, translate political interests into moral destiny, and outsource ambiguity to the enemy. The subtext isn’t that nations are fake in a harmless, postmodern way; it’s that their fictions are operational. People die for them, get displaced by them, are sorted and punished in their name. A movie’s lie ends when the credits roll; a nation’s lie keeps filing paperwork.

Žbanić also slips in a quiet jab at “realism”. If a nation is the bigger fiction, then the demand that artists be “objective” about national narratives is itself suspect. Her intent is both warning and permission: beware the story you’ve inherited, and remember you can revise the script.