When the war started, I was happy because my maths test was cancelled. What interested me most, as a teenager, was sex, or it was more talking about sex, dreaming about sex as the highest realisation of love. But in 1992 everything changed and I realised that I was living in a war, in which sex was used as part of a war strategy to humiliate women and thereby cause the destruction of an ethnic group! 20.000 women were systematically raped in Bosnia during the war.

I lived 100 metres from the front line and was most afraid of this kind of fight. Since then, rape and its consequences have become an obsession for me: I read and followed everything that was related to this topic. I still didn´t know why I did this, or what I wanted to do with this.

When I gave birth to my child, that was a fruit of love, motherhood – which triggered a whole set of emotions in me – this shocked me completely. I asked myself, what emotional significance does this have for a woman that has a child who was conceived in hate. That was the moment I knew what I wanted from Grbavica and I wrote it - between breast feeds.