A convincing portrait of how ordinary people strive to get on with their lives in the wake of terrible conflict.
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02/17/07
Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams (2007)
98
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Reviews Counted:42
Fresh:41
Rotten:1
Average Rating:7.5/10
Consensus: An emotionally blunt and gripping drama, Grbavica deftly explores the emotional toll that all wars take upon those who survive them.
Theatrical Release:15-12-2006
Synopsis: Single mother Esma lives with her 12-year-old daughter Sara in Sarajevo’s Grbavica neighborhood, where life is still being reconstructed after the 1990s Yugoslav wars. Unable to make ends meet... [More]
Reviews for Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams
Top CriticClick to read the article
08/11/07
Top CriticClick to read the article
05/19/07
Top Critic[Director Jasmila] Zbanic is such an acute observer of women's lives in their intimate details, and constructs such fine scenes, that I think this might be the best film to emerge from the aftermath of the Balkan conflict.
02/15/07
The point of the film, however, is not so much the climactic revelation of Sara’s true parentage, and the strangely sluggish narrative in which it is embedded, but rather the dismal day-by-day existence in postwar Sarajevo.
02/07/07
Jasmila Zbanic also deserves our admiration for casting Karanovic, and for making a film of great power about the fate of that ultimate contradiction -- a child born out of hatred.
04/09/07
Aided by two first-class performances by Karanovic and Mijovic, Grbavica is a low-key approach to one of the gravest, yet little-discussed problems of war.
04/19/06
Like its music, the film's emotions proceed from lament to screaming screed to chorus of hope.
05/04/07
Grbavica, like its heroine, is brave enough to try to find love among the ruins.
02/19/07
Zbanic's deeply personal saga allows us to see the savage price that women paid in the Balkan wars.
02/20/07
A powerful human drama exposing family dynamics and the deep wounds that war exacts.
01/17/07
Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams is a stilted but touching articulation of a Sarajevo suburb's collective grief years after the Bosnian War.
01/28/07
[Director] Zbanic takes an effective, low-key approach, telling the intimate story of a single mother and preteen daughter who live in Grbavica, a grim neighborhood that once served as an internment camp.
02/16/07
Gbravica is a womanly movie in the best sense: [writer-director] Zbanic has a deeply feminine sense of how crisis gets filtered through the moments of daily life.
03/01/07
Centering on a mother-daughter relationship, the Berlin Fest winner Grbavica operates on both realistic and symbolic levels, a personal film about the country's attempt to reconcile with the brutal Bosnian civil war and its painful aftermath.
02/05/07
A poignant and emotionally gripping story of a Bosnian single parent struggling to survive in Sarajevo and carrying deep physical and spiritual wounds from the 1990s wars.
02/25/07
Though in writer-director Jasmila Zbanic's gritty, affecting film the Bosnian war has been over for more than a decade, it is hardly absent in the memories of those struggling to lead normal lives amid the rubble.
02/15/07
A young Bosnian woman learns that her dad is not the heroshe thought he was in a dramatic postwar family drama in Sarajevo, Bosnia.
02/09/07
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.
04/13/07
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.
04/27/07
Latest News for Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams
May 12, 2007:
Trailer & Poster review 
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