On the Path 2010

Luna and Amar are a young Bosniak couple living in Sarajevo, carrying the heavy memories of the Bosnian War from the 1990s. Luna had witnessed the killing of her parents by an anti-Muslim militia in Bijeljina and arrived in Sarajevo as a child refugee with her grandparents. Amar, who served as a soldier during the conflict, carries the loss of his brother as part of his past. Despite these traumas, they have built what seems like a stable life: she works as an air hostess for B&H Airlines, and he is an air traffic controller at the Sarajevo International Airport. Their life together begins with a moment of closeness and passion, a reminder of how love can briefly feel healative amid long-standing scars. After a night of intimate connection, they head out to a local nightclub, trying to recapture a sense of normalcy and joy.

Yet the couple’s path is complicated by a quiet tension that grows from the friction between personal desire and faith, a tension that isn’t about religion itself but about the boundaries it draws around them. Amar’s drinking, which Islam forbids, becomes a fault line that strains their relationship even as they try to pretend it doesn’t define them. The couple’s equilibrium is further destabilized when Amar accepts a well-paid job in a distant, conservative Muslim community, far from their home in Sarajevo. The distance and new environment begin to pull them apart, and Luna’s concern for their future deepens as weeks pass with little to no contact between them. Eventually, she is allowed to visit him at this secluded lakeside community, where she observes a stark world of segregated men and veiled women, a setting that feels both peaceful and suffocating.

Luna pleads for Amar to come home, but he insists that life in this isolated enclave offers him a kind of peace and a way to keep from drinking. When he returns home briefly, his stance toward religion seems to have shifted; he argues that his only aim is to become a better person, yet Luna finds his new outlook hard to follow. The rift grows as she struggles to hold onto the life and beliefs she has always known, including her longing to start a family. The film delves into how the remnants of their war-torn past continue to haunt them, and how love alone might not be enough to sustain a lifetime of happiness. In the quiet, intimate moments and the charged conversations, Luna confronts the difficult question of whether love can endure when personal paths diverge, when faith and identity begin to redefine what they want from each other and from life itself.