Average Rating: 7.6/10
Reviews Counted: 43
Fresh: 42 | Rotten: 1
An emotionally blunt and gripping drama, Grbavica deftly explores the emotional toll that all wars take upon those who survive them.
Average Rating: 7.7/10
Critic Reviews: 17
Fresh: 17 | Rotten: 0
An emotionally blunt and gripping drama, Grbavica deftly explores the emotional toll that all wars take upon those who survive them.
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Average Rating: 3.9/5
User Ratings: 2,780
A woman sees her own traumatic past reflected in the actions of her teenage daughter in this drama from first-time writer and director Jasmila Zbanic. Esma (Mirjana Karanovic) is a single mother trying to raise her teenage daughter, Sara (Luna Mijovic), in Sarajevo in the wake of war. While Esma works as a barmaid at a nightclub run by Saran (Bogdan Diklic), a man on the wrong side of the law, she has trouble making ends meet, and receives occasional benefits payments from a support group for
Feb 16, 2007 Wide
Jun 12, 2007
Strand Releasing
All Critics (50) | Top Critics (21) | Fresh (45) | Rotten (1) | DVD (6)
Grbavica increases in power as it progresses. It's a movie about the ways in which people yearn for healing and about the many obstacles that work to prevent it.
Like its music, the film's emotions proceed from lament to screaming screed to chorus of hope.
The portrayal of a wounded society is compelling, and the film ends on a very modestly hopeful note, appropriate for a country where the 'dreams' have been mostly painful.
The admirable feminist agenda occasionally trips up the narrative, but the film's performances keep it on track.
Grbavica is a film we watch with our heart in our mouth, wondering when, if ever, the war will end for those who lived through it and, at least physically, survived.
The dramatic conflicts are soapy and unsubtle, but Karanovic pours intense authority into Esma's scarred psyche.
So intensely immediate, so caught up in the rush and roil of everyday survival, that it never becomes hopelessly sad.
[I]ts devastating power rings with honesty and terrible authenticity...
[Director] Zbanic makes the awful seem commonplace and vice versa, while adding ominous shadows to Esma's untold backstory. The war might be over, but fear and hope remain locked in a rapturous stranglehold amidst the rubble.
This is a slice of Bosnian life, a powerful peek at average people trying to live their average lives despite the extraordinary and unthinkable things that lie in their past.
Lovely in its understatement, quietly but insistently demanding that Esma's story, and those of too many other women, finally be told.
There's really nothing new about the way Grbavica looks at the mother-daughter dynamic. But it's still refreshing to see any film that does so with such honesty and realism.
Zbanic telegraphs parts of the drama a little too easily, but she draws heartbreaking performances from Karanovic and Mijovic.
While Grbavica concerns a legacy of hatred, it's also optimistic about Bosnia's physical and emotional reconstruction. If the film's final image doesn't move you, you'd better check your pulse.
The kind of well-meaning film that actually gives well-meaning films a good name.
A fantastic film that like so many others has the most simple of premises but is rich in character complexities and emotions. War torn Bosnia is relegated to the background which makes it all the more powerful, the way mass graves and dead husbands/fathers as ordinarily as the weather really amplifies how this is
September 11, 2008Super Reviewer
In "Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams," Esma(Mirjana Karanovic), a survivor of the Bosnian Genocide, is a seamstress in Sarajevo by day who takes a night job as a waitress at a bar owned by Saran(Bogdan Diklic) to make ends meet. However, the second job still does not give her enough money to pay for her daughter
November 14, 2008Super Reviewer
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