Motherhood Quote by Jasmila Žbanić

The blunt administrative language of “a synopsis” collides with the lived moral universe of Žbanić’s cinema. Genocide is what funding applications, festival catalogs, and history books demand you name; “a mother who’s protecting her family” is what the camera insists you feel. That friction is the point. Žbanić isn’t softening atrocity so much as refusing the way atrocity gets packaged: as an event with a capital-E, legible at a distance, consumable in a paragraph.

The intent is almost combative in its tenderness. By shifting the center of gravity from the geopolitical to the intimate, she defends her characters from being reduced to symbols of Balkan horror. The subtext is a critique of how audiences and institutions approach “genocide films” expecting grim education or solemn spectacle. Žbanić suggests that the truest access route isn’t explanation but proximity: the daily, desperate calculus of a parent trying to keep a family intact while the world reorganizes itself into perpetrators, bystanders, and victims.

Context matters: Žbanić’s work (especially in post-war Bosnia) sits inside a culture where mass violence is both personal memory and international shorthand. Her line acknowledges the burden of representation - the pressure to “deliver” the big theme - while asserting a quieter artistic sovereignty. Call it a rebuke to trauma as genre. She’s telling you the story won’t let you hide behind scale. If you want to understand genocide, start by watching what it does to a mother’s choices minute by minute.