What happens when trauma takes a 33-year bus ride home?
47 minSeason 1 • Episode 3
LatestAfter a long journey home, Tea, Lemja, Mirela, and Lidija reach their birthplace, Mostar. As adults, they witness the dangers they barely grasped as children. Ordinary citizens were targeted by snipers and had to shelter in bunkers from hail of bullets. The journey teaches them that it takes courage to face memories, but also that friendship and solidarity can heal old wounds and overcome divisions.
A girls' handball team from Mostar fled the war in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, thanks to their coach. After a perilous bus journey, they arrived in Oosterblokker; without their parents, living in fear and uncertainty. Searching for answers, the women returned 33 years later, by bus to Mostar.
Direction
Intimate vérité that lets silence speak volumes.
Production
Seamless archival weaving—past and present collide beautifully.
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Mostar's iconic bridge—destroyed in 1993, rebuilt in 2004—mirrors the series' central metaphor of reconstruction versus preservation.
Oosterblokker's refugee housing was part of a larger Dutch policy; most child refugees were eventually reunited with parents, making this team's prolonged separation statistically rare.
NL
