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Rating: In New York, the snow is soft, white, ladies stroll around elegantly clad in their graceful shoes. In Sarajevo, no. In Sarajevo, the snow is dirty, cold, girls walk around with pants soaked up to their knees.
In New York, skyscrapers are bright, streets are clean, cars shiny and luxurious. In Sarajevo, no. In Sarajevo, the architecture is gray and bleak, the streets are broken, the cars old and damaged. It is in this Sarajevo that Esma, a Bosnian, lives with her daughter Sara, a lively, wild teenager.
Esma works as a waitress in a smoky and shady place and adjusts by doing some small tailoring work to make ends meet. Sara's school organizes a trip: those wishing to participate must pay two hundred euros (and for a Bosnian, two hundred euros is a lot!). The children of those fallen in the war, the "martyrs," as they are defined, have the opportunity to participate for free, provided they present a document that certifies the identity of the father.
Sara is happy. She and her mother Esma are not rich: they normally could not afford such an exorbitant amount for a trip, but she knows she does not have this problem: she will present the certificate and then the trip will be free for her. She is proud of the fact her father is a martyr, a defender of Bosnia, a true hero. Esma is an ordinary woman. She loves her daughter and makes any sacrifice to ensure the girl sees all her wishes fulfilled. But she has a secret. An unrevealed secret, of which paradoxically, she is ashamed and would not reveal to her daughter for anything in the world. Until, a few days before the trip, Sara starts to become insistent, demanding from her mother the father's death certificate. Esma does everything to scrape together the money, asks for a loan from some friends. She pays for the trip.
Sara is a smart girl and knows she's entitled to a free trip. The fact that her mother paid raises her suspicions. She becomes insolent, rebellious, demanding an explanation. She ends up threatening her mother in a very violent manner: she wants to know who her father is. Esma is exasperated, hurt, angry. She lashes out at her daughter, unloading on her the repressed suffering of so many years, the frustration, the tragedy that struck her, screaming the truth in her face. Sara is the result of a rape. In her village, Grbavica, Esma suffered an "ethnic rape" at the hands of the Serbs. It's a tremendous blow for the young girl, who had always idolized a father she never knew, idealized and made him a hero and martyr in her imagination. She discovers she has Serbian blood, the hated Serbian blood. But she also perceives the deep love of her mother, who raised her while holding inside this terrible secret, giving her all the love a mother can offer to her daughter.
The Secret of Esma is not just a film: it's a slice of truth. Two hours by plane from Rome, a few hundred kilometers from our shores, there is a reality where Esma is not a character from a film. Esma is every Bosnian woman, every Kosovar woman, every woman who has suffered the horror of war and ethnic rape. Esma and Sara are all those women, young and old, trying to survive in a situation that calling it "difficult" seems to downplay the reality of the facts.
Brutally realistic and masterful is the performance of Mirjana Karanović in the role of Esma and stunning is the young Luna Mijović as Sara. In this film, there are no breathtaking beauties, no glamorous and flawless divas, there are no special effects nor tricks. In fact, the actresses act throughout the film without a hint of make-up, just as a woman is in everyday life. Esma is the woman, not the most beautiful, not the fittest, next door. Sara is the teenager with big blue, melancholic eyes we see every day returning from school. In Bosnia, there is no room for illusion, not even in cinema, and the director Jasmilia Zbanić throws this harsh reality in our wealthy Western faces. She does not do it to make us feel guilty; she simply says "here it is: this is the reality next to you: this is Bosnia."
Particularly shocking is the sequence where Sara skips school with a friend and goes wandering around the remains of a bombed-out building: suddenly the boy asks: "Have you ever been beyond the barriers?"
"Are you crazy? - the young girl replies - beyond there are corpses!"
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