Daily Inspiration Quote by Jasmila Žbanić

There’s a filmmaker’s urgency baked into Žbanić’s warning: it’s not an abstract political take, it’s a note slipped under the door while the hallway is already filling with smoke. “Threatening presence” is deliberately tactile. The right-wing isn’t framed as an idea to debate but as a force that occupies space, pressures institutions, changes what people feel safe saying. And “presence” also implies normalization: the danger isn’t only the extremists, it’s their steady inclusion in the everyday.

The sharpest move is the conditional: “people should know what happens if we are not careful”. Žbanić is invoking memory as a civic tool, not nostalgia. Coming from a Bosnian director whose work is shaped by the afterlife of the Yugoslav wars and the politics of denial, the line carries the weight of lived precedent: the slide doesn’t announce itself as catastrophe. It arrives as “concern”, as “order”, as a promise to protect “our” people, and then it rewrites the boundaries of who counts.

The pronouns do real work. “We live” and “we are not careful” makes complicity a shared risk; it refuses the comforting story that only villains drive history. It also suggests her real target is complacency among moderates, cultural institutions, and liberals who treat politics as cyclical weather instead of cumulative damage.

As a director, Žbanić’s intent is almost programmatic: warn the audience before the plot hardens. The subtext is a critique of spectatorship itself - if you only watch, you’re already late.