Handlung

A woman and her daughter struggle to make their way through the aftermath of the Bosnian War.

Set against the backdrop of a former Yugoslavia of the 1990s, this is a single mother's anguish of how one must deal with truths and how to cope with a war's terrible past. Both she and the 12-year-old daughter she must bring up by herself come head-to-head when a school trip is in the air and complications and rude awakenings arise from the ashes of the cold and callous days of conflict, xenophobia, and its secrets.—Cinema_Fan

Jasmila Zbanic's debut movie focuses on the Balkan War's painful aftermath on a Bosnian woman and her daughter. Esma is living with her 12-year-old daughter Sara in Grbavica, a quarter of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo. When Sara wants to participate in a school trip, Esma tries to find a way to pay the full price, although a certificate proving that Sara's father is a war hero would allow her a discount.—fippi2000

In Grbavica, Sarajevo, Esma Halilovic raises her preteen daughter Sara alone with many difficulties, working many double shifts. Every now and then she participates in group therapy with other traumatized Bosnian women who have survived the Balkan War. Esma needs 200 Euros for Sara's school trip and works hard to raise that amount. When Sara's teacher tells her that she could travel for free if she can prove that her father was a war hero, she presses her mother to give her the document. But Esma borrows the money and pays the full price and Sara forces her mother to disclose the truth about her father.—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Sara (Luna Mijovic) is a young girl whose class plans to go on a school trip. Since children of fallen warriors in the last war are not suppose to pay, Sara thinks that she is one of them (because her mother told her that her father got killed in war). Esma (Mirjana Karanovic), her mother has two things to deal with and that is the explanation to her only child that she was raped and that Sara's father is not a fallen warrior, and she has to collect the money for her daughter to go to the school trip.