Here begins anew my career as a film critic.  An edited version of this review is up on DCist.

Early in Grbavica: City of My Dreams, an import from Bosnia and Herzegovina that arrives at the E Street Cinemas April 13, a woman tearfully recalls the day Serb soldiers stormed her Sarajevo home, ordering her and her family—whose faces she says she has now forgotten—to leave.  She’s part of a support group for women who lived through the mid-1990s genocide that killed at least 100,000 and displaced the better part of two million people.  Another woman in the room, presumably a fellow survivor, gets a fit of the giggles.  In an American film, someone would have to upbraid the giggler for her heartlessness, possibly slamming her against the nearest wall for dramatic effect.  But in this one, the first woman keeps remembering, and talking, and crying, while the second woman’s laughing fit gradually spreads through the room until nearly all of victims are smiling and laughing through their grief.

The scene efficiently establishes the unsentimental yet hopeful tone of the picture, which is named for a Sarajevo neighborhood that became the site of a concentration camp during the 1992-5 conflict.  The story is simple. Esma (Mirjana Karanovic) was a medical student before the war, but now she’s just a weary 40-something single mother trying to scrape together enough cash to pay for her 12-year-old daughter’s upcoming class trip.  An uneasy peace has settled over her city:  Snipers no longer target civilians in public squares, but jobs are scarce, crime pervasive, and anyone out of their teens remembers how easily their once-secure urban existence can slide into bedlam.  Unable to make ends meet on government relief checks, Esma takes a job waiting tables at a dodgy nightclub, leaving her exhausted during the day and straining her relationship with Sara, her daughter.  The union is further tested when Sara catches the eye of a boy at school whose father was a “shaheed,” a Muslim martyred in the war, as Sara has been told her father was.  The boy proudly tells Sara of his father’s heroic death, but when Sara can’t tell of her own father’s killing in similarly reverent detail, troubling questions emerge.

The scenario is standard, well-old family drama, but the setting is everything:  Sarajevo is a city haunted by war.  Neighbors speak matter-of-factly about the excavation of mass graves that may at last allow them to identify the remains of their loved ones, and even outwardly resilient people, like Esma, carry deep psychological scars.  The stakes feel desperately high precisely because they are so refreshingly human-scale: Will Esma be abused at her new job?  Will she find the money for Sara’s trip?  Can we trust the bouncer Esma has befriended at work? 

It’s tribute to the strength of the performances, and to first-time writer/director Jasmila Zbanic’s crisp, observant storytelling, that we actually want answers to these questions.  Both Karanovic and Luna Mijovic, making her acting debut as Sara, are spot-on.  (Mijokic plays the only 12-year-old I can recall from any semi-recent film that actually seems 12 rather than twenty-two.)  Although “Grbavica” runs only 90 minutes, it manages to feel unhurried, pausing to soak up tone and detail that create genuine sense of place.  That isn’t to say it’s boring – it isn’t, ever, not for a minute – but rather that it’s imbued with the sense that events, and life, are ongoing outside of what we see in the frame.  The film addresses the war in much the same way.  While the characters seldom speak of it explicitly, you feel its continuing influence on their destinies in every scene. The shot of Esma’s face when a group of her fellow bus passengers break into a song she recalls from her youth tells us everything we need to know about what trials both extraordinary (war) and ordinary (age) have cost her.  Likewise, when Esma sees things at her nightclub job that conjure memories of what she endured in the war, we don’t, contrary to studio-movie convention, need to see flashbacks of what she’s remembering.  We see her face, and it’s enough.

This is the sort of film that inevitably sounds dull in synopsis—after all, most viewers don’t have to go to the movies to see mothers and daughters fighting or women stuck in dead-end jobs.  The drippy title won’t help you sell it to your friends, either.  But given half a chance, it engrosses you completely.  Shot through with quiet suspense and understated wit, Grbavica remembers that when calamity recedes, life goes on, day by beautiful, heartbreaking day.