Jasmila Zbanic's Esma's Secret, which won the Golden Bear at this year's Berlin film festival, is a small, intense film set in a suburb of Sarajevo where wounds left by the war in the 1990s have not healed. The eponymous Esma is a Bosnian widow in her 30s raising her rebellious 12-year-old daughter Sara, and as we see from the scars on her back, she's suffered in an undisclosed way. She attends state-sponsored group therapy, mainly to pick up the money doled out each month to widows and other victims of the war. But she won't discuss her secret, though it's not difficult to guess what it is. To raise money for Sara's school trip she begs, borrows and takes a job as cocktail waitress in a garish nightclub. She avoids producing the papers that would confirm her late husband as a shahheed (war martyr) and get the girl a free trip. Why? Well, that's the secret.
The film has a sure sense of place. This is a city of loss where everyone is trying to move on or move out, a shattered society attempting to rebuild itself spiritually and physically. Esma has a tentative affair with another troubled survivor, a handsome intellectual whose education was broken off by the war and who now works as bodyguard to the brutal nightclub owner, and she regular visits morgues in the hope of finding the body of her father. But most of her friendships are with women, who work together, comforting each other in these hard times.
