Unlike the often vituperative attacks on Ms. Zbanic in many Serb media outlets, direct criticism in Bosnia has been relatively muted, mostly limited to comments on social media by fringe nationalists, who view her an insufficiently supportive of a nation-building project rooted in religion and rural tradition.
When filling in official documents that ask her to declare to which of Bosnia’s three main ethnic groups — Bosniak, Serb or Croat — she belongs, she writes “other.” “I cannot identify with nationalism or nations,” she said.
She left Bosnia near the end of the fighting for the United States, training at the Bread and Puppet Theater, a politically active troupe in Vermont. She then returned to Sarajevo, teaming up with Damir Ibrahimovic, now her husband and longtime producer, to make her first films. They have one daughter.
Raised in Sarajevo by economist parents, Ms. Zbanic has fond memories of Yugoslavia before it imploded. “Socialism brought huge, huge progress to our society, especially for women,” she said. “It was not a democratic society at all. But while there are many things to criticize, the fact is that my parents got educated for free, and when they married they got an apartment for free.”
Today’s politicians, she said, whether Bosniak, Serb or Croat, have little interest in making people’s lives better. Instead, they “use conflict as a way of dealing with each other,” she said, adding, “They are just recycling old narratives because that keeps them in power.”