Art & Creativity Quote by Jasmila Žbanić

There’s a quiet provocation in Žbanić’s phrasing: not that art makes life nicer, but that without it life becomes incoherent. “Wouldn’t make any sense” isn’t a plea for funding or prestige; it’s a claim about survival, memory, and moral orientation. Coming from a director who has repeatedly staged the aftershocks of war and political violence, the line reads less like artsy idealism and more like hard-won realism: when institutions fail, when official narratives lie, culture becomes the place where people test what really happened and what it meant to them.

The intent is almost diagnostic. Žbanić frames art and culture as the grammar of experience, the thing that turns raw events into something legible. That’s why the quote avoids grand metaphysical language. It’s personal (“I had feeling”), slightly tentative, like someone describing a truth learned from living through disorientation rather than from theory. The subtext: sense doesn’t arrive automatically. It has to be made, argued over, performed, filmed, archived. And if you don’t make it, someone else will do it for you - often power, often propaganda.

Context matters here because Žbanić works in a region where “culture” isn’t a luxury category; it’s contested terrain. Film, music, language, even humor can be battlegrounds over whose pain counts, whose history gets screen time, whose future is imaginable. Her line gently insists that culture isn’t decoration on top of life. It’s the infrastructure that keeps life from collapsing into noise.