Daily Inspiration Quote by Jasmila Žbanić

Žbanić’s line refuses the comfortable geography of blame. By rejecting the idea that violence is “exclusively a Balkans thing”, she’s pushing back against a familiar Western reflex: to treat the region as a permanent cautionary tale, a place where “ancient hatreds” supposedly simmer outside normal history. The move is strategic. It doesn’t absolve anyone; it strips away the alibi that atrocity belongs to someone else’s culture.

The subtext is less about the Balkans than about the audience. “It could happen to any of us” is a provocation aimed at viewers who like their tragedies safely foreign, morally legible, and quarantined. Žbanić, whose work circles the Bosnian war and its long aftermath (most notably in Quo Vadis, Aida?), knows how easily bureaucracies turn into machines, how neighbors become informants, how institutions designed for protection can fail by procedure rather than malice. Her claim is that the ingredients are banal and portable: fear, grievance, opportunism, obedience, a shortage of consequences.

There’s also an artistic intent embedded here: she’s arguing for cinema as a moral equalizer, not a museum of exotic suffering. If you watch her stories and think “those people”, you’ve missed the point. The line functions like a mirror held at arm’s length, then slowly tilted back toward you, insisting that the real horror isn’t difference. It’s similarity under pressure.