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After the end of the war in Bosnia,
Halima, a good-natured peasant woman from a
remote Muslim village in Western Bosnia,
searches for the remains of her husband and
her teenage son, who were taken by Serbian
paramilitary forces and executed. Using DNA
analysis, the UN Committee for Missing
Persons manages to identify the remains of
her husband in one of the mass graves, but
the Committee still can't identify the
remains of her son, since Halima refuses to
give a blood sample for DNA testing. There
is something that the Committee doesn't
know, something that Halima is hiding from
others: her beloved son wasn’t actually her
biological son.
The story takes us back two decades ago,
during the period of Yugoslavia, where we
learn how Halima and her husband became
adoptive parents, after fruitless efforts to
have a child on their own. Along with that
story, we follow Halima's path nowadays
while she is searching for the biological
mother of her son, the only person who can
give a blood sample, to help identify the
remains of her adopted son. We learn that
the biological mother of Halima's son is her
own niece, her brother's daughter, who had
an affair with a Serbian boyfriend from a
nearby village. Since Halima's brother
strongly disapproved of his teenage
daughter's relationship with a Christian
boy, his daughter has secretly given the
unwanted child to her aunt Halima, hiding
this from the others, and more importantly,
from her own Serbian boyfriend who thought
that the baby had died.
As Halima searches for her estranged niece,
who now lives in the Serbian controlled part
of the Bosnia with her husband and three
daughters and doesn't want to have any links
to her previous life, Halima discovers a
horrifying fact from her worst nightmares
which stops her from searching further.
Still, with this discovery, the spiral of
tragic events from the past would continue
in the present, disrupting once again the
troubled lives of the characters.
Once the remains have been identified and
buried with dignity, the characters manage
to overcome their differences from the past
and come together, ending Halima’s path with
redemption and understanding. |
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