Esma, a single mother whose husband is rumoured to have died in the Balkan conflict, struggles to bring up her 12-year-old daughter Sara in the run-down Sarajevan district of Grbavica.
Sara is desperate for her mother to raise two hundred euros so she can go on a school trip. Barely surviving on paltry state benefits, Esma takes a job as a waitress in a low-rent night club.
Finding her family’s poverty humiliating, Sara recovers a sense of pride when she tells her teachers she is the daughter of a war martyr lending her both status among her peers and exemption from having to pay for the school trip. Unfortunately Sara father’s body has yet to be found and so she lacks any hard proof of his martyr status.
Sara turns to her mother for concrete proof of her father’s fate but is completely unprepared for Esma’s devastating revelation of their secret family history.
Esma’s Secret is a keenly balanced complex emotional drama where nothing is black and white and everything is engrossingly multifaceted. On every level, personal, political and ideological, this is a film about struggling to maintain human dignity in the face of crushing poverty and the brutalizing after-effects of war.
Winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.