Jasmila Žbanić's film "BIRTHDAY" is about two girls born on the same day in Mostar. On this day, November 9 1993, the Stari Most was destroyed: the historic bridge that was the architectural symbol for the connection between two parts of the town in which different ethnic groups live. Growing up on different sides of the divided city, the girls do not know one another. The film director accompanies the two girls till 23 July 2004, the day of the bridge's official reopening. Jasmila Žbanić was born in Sarajevo in 1974. She studied film and theater direction and worked as a puppeteer and clown in numerous performances, including tours abroad. Žbanić wrote theater scripts and short stories at the same time that she began her first film work. In 1995, she made the 5-minute video "Autobiography", with which she won the first prize of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art, Sarajevo. Her first documentary was "After, After" (1997). In 1998, she directed the short film "Love Is…" and the documentary "We Light the Night", which was awarded the FIPRESCI at the Sarajevo Film Festival and the prize of the jury at the New York Expo Film Festival. In 2000, Jasmila Žbanić's awardwinning documentary "Red Rubber Boots" was shown on ZDF/3 Sat: the film is a calm portrait of a mother who, together with the "commission for finding missing persons," is searching for her daughter who was kidnapped and murdered in the war. The 2003 documentary "Images from a Corner" premiered in Berlin and was a commissioned work for ZDF/ARTE. Here Žbanić tries to describe her relationship to the traumatic aspects of her own war experience, using the fate of her friend Biljana as a foil. A comprehensive show of works by Jasmila Žbanić entitled "We Light the Night" has just finished its run at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel.