Daily Inspiration Quote by Jasmila Žbanić

There’s a deliberate modesty in Žbanić’s claim that also reads like a rebuke to the way “changing the world” is usually sold: as a branding promise, a victory lap, a quantifiable impact report. She starts with the grandiose slogan and then immediately narrows it to the smallest unit of moral consequence: one person choosing not to harm. It’s a director’s version of refusing spectacle. The world doesn’t flip; a finger doesn’t pull a trigger, a fist unclenches, a stranger is spared. That’s the scale she’s arguing for, and it’s quietly radical.

The subtext is shaped by her context: a Bosnian filmmaker whose work (most notably Quo Vadis, Aida?) circles the trauma of war and the bureaucracy of violence. When you’ve watched harm become routine - filed, stamped, normalized - the fantasy isn’t that cinema “raises awareness”. It’s that cinema interrupts the story people tell themselves when they’re about to cross a line. Žbanić isn’t pitching film as therapy or propaganda; she’s defending it as an ethical encounter. A movie can force proximity: to faces you’d rather abstract, to grief you’d rather outsource, to culpability you’d rather deny.

The intent is also protective. Artists are pressured to justify their existence with world-historical outcomes. Žbanić reframes success as prevention, not applause. One changed viewer is not a consolation prize; it’s a concrete counterfactual, a tiny veto against violence. In a culture addicted to scale, she insists that the humane metric is restraint.