Daily Inspiration Quote by Jasmila Žbanić

Restraint, here, is not a lack of nerve but a deliberate redistribution of power. Žbanić frames the audience as collaborators rather than consumers: if viewers can imagine “many things”, then the filmmaker’s job isn’t to spell trauma out in viscera, but to build the conditions where it becomes unavoidable anyway. That’s a quietly radical ethic in a screen culture trained to equate seriousness with graphic proof.

The intent sits at the intersection of craft and care. By refusing “blood and violence in an obvious way”, she rejects spectacle as a shortcut to authenticity. Obviousness isn’t just aesthetic; it’s moral. When violence is rendered as a visible event to be watched, it risks becoming content - something the camera can “handle” for us, neatly packaged as catharsis. Suggestion, by contrast, keeps the wound open in the mind, where it’s harder to domesticate. The subtext is almost an accusation: if you demand to see everything, what kind of witness are you trying to be?

The context matters because Žbanić’s work is inseparable from the afterlives of Balkan war and genocide, where representation is always political: images can testify, but they can also retraumatize, sensationalize, or flatten history into a horror genre. Her choice honors survivors and refuses to turn suffering into a set piece. It also trusts that viewers don’t need to be bludgeoned to understand; they need to be implicated. The violence lands not as a special effect, but as a moral atmosphere you can’t shake off.