We’re raising funds not just for our documentary but also a social justice project set in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, where resilient workers fight to keep their doors open in an ethnically divided city scarred by war, sharing personal stories about what it means to persevere in their trades and identity amid the forces of cultural erasure, globalization, and corruption, as the city attempts to move on without them.
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More than three decades after the gruelling war, the scars are still visible in the complex socio-political tapestry of the director's hometown. To this day, it remains fractured along its east-west axis, physically separated by the river Neretva, but systemically separated into two ethnic sides, the Bosniak and the Croat, faltering peace and cementing the emphasis on the differences rather than what makes us one ‘narod’ or people. This separation has trickled down to separate schools, a lack of common shared spaces for youth from both sides, and very little interaction between the different ethnic groups, sometimes driven by fear of “the other side.”
Shaped by unresolved trauma, political stagnation, corruption, and economic precarity, the so-called peace remains a hollow concept with few true attempts at reconciliation, with everyday life in Mostar continuing under conditions of separation but quiet endurance. However, it is exactly this persistence that is the driver of everyday Mostarian life, as well as the core of understanding peace in this project. Inat, an ethnically rooted Bosnian and Herzegovinian concept, is often misread as stubbornness when roughly translated. Locally, it is more accurately lived as persistence, dignity, and refusal to disappear despite all odds, much like the people of Mostar have been doing for the past three decades in the institutional division that has failed them repeatedly.
But when institutions falter and political narratives fail, it is often the ordinary people, laborers, artisans, and service workers who continue to hold the city together. These people continue to live, work, and raise futures within systems that never fully healed, and their voices are rarely centered in mainstream media or formal peacebuilding discourse, despite their fundamental role in the preservation of Mostar’s social fabric. Having survived shelling, rebuilding, and decades of political stagnation, these individuals now face new threats: gentrification, cultural erasure, fading interest in their trades, and a system dominated by corruption and corporate power.
This project, Inatlije or roughly translated as “The People of Inat,” emerges from this reality. It explores how peace is sustained not through declarations, but through repetition: the same workspaces, the same customers, the same streets crossed each day. Inatlije or “The People of Inat” is a hybrid documentary and community-based social engagement project that ultimately combines feature-length socio-political filmmaking with public programming, artistic intervention, student organizing, and NGO collaborations across both East and West Mostar, encompassing interaction of all ethnic and religious identities.
