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A country of relatively recent independence, Bosnia-Herzegovina has emerged from the devastation of the Yugoslavian war. Carrying scars from the last two decades this nation has produced a magnificently gripping volume of cultural output.
Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andric achieved great international acclaim for his Bridge Over the Drina. The novel is set in the East Bosnian town of Visegrad where Andric spent a large part of his childhood. Bosnian Chronicle is another highly recommendable Andric-book. Mesa Selimovic's Death and the Dervish is a fundamental read within Bosnian literature and Semezdin Mehmedinovic's poetry about Sarajevo under siege during the war in Sarajevo Blues is unavoidable when examining the cultural produce of this nation within the last two decades.
Bosnia has established a firm reputation within filmmaking and plenty of its young talented directors have received international awards for their work. Jasmila Zbanic'sEsma's Secretor Grbavica as it is also known, won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2006. It tells the dramatic story of a young Bosnian girl and her attempts to find out who her father really was. Sarajevo-born Emir Kusturica has won the Cannes Film Festival's Palme D'Or twice and is a highly respected director, as is Danis Tanovic who won an Academy Award for his film No Man's Land.