Circles

Srdan Golubović's Circles (Krugovi) won the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award at Sundance 2013 and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the Berlin Film Festival the same year. Written by Srđan Koljević and Melina Pota Koljević, it was inspired by a real incident from the Bosnian War in 1993, when a Bosnian Serb soldier, Srđan Aleksić, stepped in to protect a Bosnian Muslim civilian from a beating in the town of Trebinje, and was killed by his own comrades for it.

The film follows what came after across twelve years and three countries (Serbia, Germany and the eastern Republika Srpska). The man who was protected, the dead soldier's best friend, his grieving father and the son of one of his killers each carry those few minutes with them, every one in a different way. Golubović keeps the structure patient and almost procedural, cutting between the present-day adult lives of the four central men and brief flashbacks to the day itself.

It is a film about small acts of moral courage and the long shadows they cast, and the unsensational specificity of its post-war Serbian-Bosnian setting makes it one of the most honest pieces of regional cinema about what the Yugoslav wars left behind. Golubović's earlier The Trap (2007) had already set out his procedural realism; Circles is his most fully realised work.