Daily Inspiration Quote by Jasmila Žbanić

Refusing the spectacle is the point. When Jasmila Zbanic says, "I really think we don’t have to see men in blood to know that they were all killed", she’s not sanitizing violence; she’s indicting the culture that demands it as proof. The line reads like a director’s ethical boundary, but it’s also a rebuke to an audience trained by war cinema to equate gore with honesty and restraint with denial.

The context is inseparable from Zbanic’s Bosnia, from Srebrenica, from a history where the bodies were real, the numbers contested by bad-faith politics, and the survivors forced to repeatedly "perform" their trauma for recognition. Her intent is to protect the dead from becoming props and the living from being re-traumatized. The subtext: the camera can be a weapon, too. Showing less can be more truthful because it resists the conversion of atrocity into consumable imagery.

Formally, the quote argues for implication over illustration. Off-screen death doesn’t weaken the horror; it relocates it into absence, into the pit in the stomach where imagination does the work and denial has less to grab onto. Blood can become a genre cue, even a thrill. Absence becomes an accusation: if you need the red to believe the loss, you’re already participating in a kind of erasure. Zbanic’s restraint is a demand that empathy not be conditional on spectacle.