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. Adapted from a Serbian short story by Srđan Koljević, the film was inspired by an actual incident from the Bosnian War in 1993, in which a Yugoslav People's Army soldier intervened to protect a Bosnian Muslim civilian from being beaten in the town of Trebinje, and was killed by his own colleagues for the intervention.

The film follows the consequences across twelve years and three countries — Serbia, Germany and the eastern Republika Srpska. The man who was protected, the brother of the soldier who died, the perpetrator who killed him, the perpetrator's father — each carries the consequences of those few minutes in different ways. The film's structure is patient and quietly procedural, intercutting between the present-day adult lives of the four central men and the brief flashbacks to the day itself.

The film operates as a meditation on small acts of moral courage and their long shadows — and, in the unsensational specificity of its post-war Serbian-Bosnian setting, as one of the most honest pieces of regional cinema about the lasting consequences of the Yugoslav wars. Golubović's earlier The Trap (2007) had already established his procedural-realism register; Circles is widely considered his most fully realised work.