Politics & Power Quote by Jasmila Žbanić

There’s a filmmaker’s impatience baked into this line: a refusal to keep treating global institutions as abstract sets and diplomatic theater. When Jasmila Zbanic says the U.N. should “serve the people and not politicians”, she’s not making a wonky governance proposal so much as issuing a moral continuity check. The U.N. sells itself as a postwar promise to prevent atrocity and protect civilians, yet its most visible moments are often stalemates, vetoes, and carefully worded statements that arrive after the bodies. The quote works because it turns a procedural critique into an ethical one, implying that “politicians” are not merely flawed managers but a class whose incentives structurally misalign with human urgency.

As a director shaped by the Balkans and the long shadow of international failure, Zbanic’s subtext is hard to miss: “people” is not a sentimental category; it’s survivors, displaced families, the missing, the witnesses who are asked to wait while power negotiates with itself. In that light, “serve” is pointedly unglamorous. It’s the language of duty, not prestige - the opposite of the U.N. as branding exercise or photo-op machine.

The cultural punch comes from her medium. Filmmakers traffic in faces and consequences; they make systems legible by showing who pays for them. This line is a demand that the U.N. be judged the same way a story is judged: not by intentions, but by outcomes - and by whose lives are treated as expendable to keep the plot of geopolitics moving.