When the civil war broke out in Bosnia Herzegovina, Jasmila Zbanic was 17 years old.
"At the time, I had one main thing on the brain, and that was sex, like any ordinary teenager," she laughs, "but the war changed everything. I learned that sex could be used as a weapon in warfare, and that rape was one of the worst brutalities that could happen to a human being. Like everyone else in Sarajevo, I was horrified. The world had turned into a place of horror and unspeakable evil."
That memory is one of the things that propelled Zbanic to become a filmmaker. After making short films and documentaries on the aftermath of the Balkan War, Zbanic got the funds together to create "Grbavica" — (released in Japan as "Sarajevo no Hana"), a quiet heartache of a film that deals with one of Bosnia's most lingering traumas: the systematic rape and humiliation of thousands of women, both Serb and Muslim.