Daily Inspiration Quote by Jasmila Žbanić

Betrayal here isn’t framed as a personal wound; it’s described as a demolition of reality. Žbanić chooses the blunt escalation from “your people” to “anything in the world”, a move that maps how political violence travels: it starts with a targeted community and ends by poisoning the basic contracts that make life legible. The bracketed “it not only” matters because it signals an argument she’s tightening in real time. She’s correcting for how audiences often process atrocity as distant suffering that belongs to someone else. No: the point is the spillover. When institutions abandon a population, the lesson isn’t merely that “they” were unsafe; the lesson is that safety itself was conditional, revocable, and therefore suspect.

As a director shaped by the post-Yugoslav wars, Žbanić is speaking from a cultural landscape where “betrayal” has a specific historical frequency: promises of protection, international assurances, neighborly coexistence, then the sudden reveal that those assurances were theater. Her films (and public statements around them) often press on the psychological aftershocks of that reveal: the way trauma becomes epistemic, not just emotional. You don’t just grieve people; you grieve the idea that words bind, that systems have meaning, that the world operates by rules you can trust.

The intent is moral, but also cinematic: to force viewers to feel betrayal not as plot twist but as atmosphere, a permanent weather system. That’s why the line lands. It refuses the comforting version of history where catastrophes are exceptions; it insists they are verdicts on belief itself.