Partisan Babies

Documentary | UK, Bosnia & Hercegovina | Development

Partisan Babies begins with a 1942 photograph of my great-grandmother Jelena, and her daughters, taken after their capture during the Battle of Kozara on the way to Jasenovac concentration camp. The image later became a Yugoslav symbol of survival, but for my family it remained a wound carried across generations. Through a road journey across Bosnia with my mother and newborn daughter, the film confronts inherited trauma shaped by war, exile, and silence. Letters written by Jelena during WWII and by my grandmother Dušanka as a refugee in Britain reconnect buried voices with the present. Interweaving five generations of women with Bosnia’s unfinished political history, the film explores land, memory, resistance, and the legacy of antifascist struggle while asking how trauma can transform into resilience and how new generations might begin again.

Director: Aleksandra Bilic

Produced by: Nadja Lapcevic

Associate Producer: Natalie Ng Milavic

Editor: Alice Powell