‘Focus, Grandma’ Review: A Modest Black Comedy Set in Sarajevo in 1992

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As the siblings and their spouses arrive from far-flung parts of Yugoslavia, their squabbles and meanderings down memory lane, as well as machinations over the anticipated inheritance, distract the…

The micro-budget feature “Focus, Grandma” from Bosnian helmer-writer Pjer Žalica is a black comedy set in Sarajevo during the spring of 1992, when members of a dysfunctional family are summoned to the bed of their dying matriarch. As the siblings and their spouses arrive from far-flung parts of Yugoslavia, their squabbles and meanderings down memory lane, as well as machinations over the anticipated inheritance, distract them from the bigger picture of what is happening to their country.

After the sympathetic family doctor visits the home of Marija, the titular grandma and declares her time is nigh, her flustered cohabitants, daughter Kika and her bumbling mate Muhamed , start to summon the rest of the clan. Luckily, Kika’s sister from Croatia, the cynical Aša , and her highly capable daughter Juca are already visiting, under the guise of another errand.

Marija’s apparent favorites are her youngest daughter Suzana and Suza’s imposing and wily husband Bane from wild Montenegro. But equally crafty is her Serbian daughter-in-law Stojanka , the wife of weak-willed Damir . Kika snidely notes to Aša that their brother “can’t even fart without his wife.” Žalica, who is also active as a documentarian and a professor at the Academy of Performing Arts Sarajevo, hasn’t helmed a fiction feature since 2004’s “Days And Hours.” “Grandma” unreels during a more innocent time, when the Republic of Yugoslavia had not yet fully splintered, and the dialogue reveals the conflicting beliefs of the extended family, views that were later exploited by nationalists on the various sides.

 

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