Bosnia, 1 9 7 7. Bosniak girl Safija became pregnant with Serb lad Slavomir. Due to an argument with her father, Slavomir goes to work in Germany. Since Safija doesn't want the child, she gives it to her aunt Halima for adoption, who is infertile. Halima and her husband Salko raise the boy, naming him Mirza. Slavomir returns to Bosnia with money, but Safija tells him their baby died at birth. After the Bosnian War, Halima is summoned by the commission for missing people who found the remains of her late husband, but they need her DNA sample to determine Mirza's identity. Halima thus persuades Safija to go to the laboratory and give her own blood posing as Halima. Slavomir is a nervous wreck. He remembers what happened: during the war, Slavomir was drafted by the Serb army and forced to shoot Bosniaks, including Salko and Mirza. Slavomir cannot live with himself and thus commits suicide.
"Halima's Path" is one of those movies that are more valuable from a humanitarian perspective than from an artistic one, yet it presents an episode from the Bosnian War as a well restructured Greek tragedy. Bosnian screenwriter Feđa Isović (comedy series "Lud, zbunjen, normalan") and Croatian director Arsen Anton Ostojic craft a noble film with a message, yet its story is rather underdeveloped, thin and simplistic. Nonetheless, Ostojic directs some moments with a remarkable subtlety. Through its story of a Bosniak woman who became pregnant with a Serb man, gave birth to a boy and gave him up for adoption to a Bosniak family, the movie presents all the detrimental wreckage of ethnic cleansing and territorial nationalism, since the communities often get so interwoven that in the end one side actually even destroys itself together with the nation they target. Emotional, calm, measured and minimalistic, "Halima's Path" gains the most through some examples of match cuts or association cuts—the best one is when Slavomir is sitting in a night club and remembers how he was a paramilitary during the war, as his commander orders him to shoot Bosniaks in the forest, but he hesitates. The clips thus flip-flop back and forth between these two time periods, and as the commander from Slavomir's past orders him again: "shoot!", Slavomir in the present takes out a gun in the night club and starts shooting in a outburst of pain and guilt. More creativity and build-up of the storyline would have been welcomed, yet the ending leaves a strong impression, summing everything up without preaching.
Grade:++
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