Politics & Power Quote by Jasmila Žbanić

There’s a quiet urgency in Žbanić’s phrasing: “my big wish” sounds almost modest, but it’s doing the work of an alarm bell. She isn’t asking for applause or awards; she’s asking for witnesses. The sentence is built like a widening lens - “people in Europe… in America, everywhere” - as if the geography itself is the problem. In her world, distance doesn’t just dilute empathy; it actively enables denial, revisionism, and the comfortable fiction that atrocity is someone else’s regional issue.

Žbanić, best known internationally for films that confront the Bosnian war’s legacy (including the Srebrenica genocide), is speaking into a familiar frustration for artists from “post-conflict” countries: the sense that Western audiences treat such stories as grim, optional education. Her intent is corrective, almost journalistic. “Understanding what happens” isn’t about plot comprehension; it’s about political literacy. The subtext is that people still don’t understand - or pretend not to - and that misunderstanding has consequences: for survivors living alongside perpetrators, for nationalist mythmaking, for Europe’s self-image as a continent that learned its lesson.

The slightly broken cadence (“everywhere, understanding what happens”) reads like a thought pushed out faster than it can be polished. That roughness matters. It signals she’s not selling a prestige product; she’s trying to transmit reality through cinema because official narratives so often fail. The film becomes a passport for truth, crossing borders that morality and media coverage too easily respect.