War & Peace Quote by Jasmila Žbanić

War, in Žbanić’s framing, isn’t the operatic spectacle that movies and politicians so often sell; it’s a dead-eyed process. By yoking it to Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”, she drags violence out of the realm of monsters and into the fluorescent-lit office, where cruelty is filed, stamped, routed, and defended as “procedure”. The phrase “inhuman and bureaucratised” lands like an accusation aimed at systems, not just soldiers: war survives because it learns to look normal.

As a Bosnian filmmaker shaped by the aftermath of Yugoslavia’s collapse, Žbanić speaks from a landscape where atrocity wasn’t only rage in the street but paperwork in ministries, lists in municipal buildings, decisions dispersed across committees and chains of command. Her intent is almost polemical: to deny audiences the comfort of believing evil is exceptional. If the machinery is bureaucratic, the perpetrators can claim they were merely doing a job; the victims become case numbers; accountability dissolves into departments.

It also reads as a critique of how modern states launder violence through managerial language: “targets”, “collateral”, “security operations”. That vocabulary doesn’t just describe war; it makes it easier to tolerate, to outsource morally, to watch at a distance. Žbanić’s subtext, sharpened by her medium, is that storytelling has to resist that normalization. If war is made banal by systems, art has to make its banality legible - and therefore indictable.