Politics & Power Quote by Jasmila Žbanić

Žbanić is doing something more radical than waving off borders: she’s demoting the nation from an assumed moral container to a mere piece of set dressing. The line’s blunt repetition of “called” is the tell. Nations are, at base, labels we agree to treat as natural facts; cinema, she argues, doesn’t have to keep honoring that agreement. In a medium that’s constantly asked to serve as cultural diplomacy or national branding - “a Bosnian film”, “a Serbian story”, “Balkan cinema” - she refuses the filing cabinet.

The intent isn’t naïve cosmopolitanism. It’s a filmmaker’s insistence on where meaning actually lives: in bodies, rooms, choices, shame, complicity, survival. National frameworks can explain the distribution of power, the bureaucracy of violence, the language on official forms. They can’t be allowed to explain people away. When Žbanić says it shouldn’t matter “to anything”, she’s also pushing back against the way nationalism recruits art into identity enforcement: the demand to represent, to justify, to pick a side, to translate trauma into a usable myth.

The context is hard to miss in her work and in the region she’s from: post-Yugoslav realities where “nation” is not an abstract category but a machine that sorted neighbors into enemies. Her subtext is a warning wrapped in an aesthetic principle: if we treat nations as destiny, storytelling becomes border control. If we treat them as names, films can return to their most dangerous power - making the viewer’s empathy cross lines politics insists are real.