North-Macedonian director Teona Strugar Mitevska's sixth feature film adds a new layer to her affective archeology of post-Yugoslav collective and individual identities. Strugar Mitevska's films, consistently appreciated by the international community of film critics since her directorial debut Veta (short, 2001), primarily focus on female protagonists at odds with social norms and expectations. Involuntarily but without much resistance, these characters undergo difficult and complex processes of leaving behind the living conditions, relationships, or ideas that they had been accustomed to. The director has been praised for her unique visual style: in particular, for her capacity to uncover compositional and chromatic beauty in the most unlikely surroundings. Since the start of her collaboration with Elma Tataragić, who co-wrote the script for Strugar Mitevska's 2019 feature God Exists, and her Name is Petrunija, her films have also been characterized by a dark, dry humor that renders the protagonists and their stories relatable and memorable.

The Happiest Man in the World, centered on a middle-aged woman protagonist's coming to terms with her traumatic experience of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s, is no outlier despite the title. Inspired by Tataragić's personal experience, the film traces Asja's (Jelena Kordić Kuret) emotional confrontation with Zoran (Adnan Omerović), a fellow Sarajevan who had served in the army of Republika Srpska during its siege of Sarajevo (1992–95). In 1993, Zoran happened to fire his very first rifle shots at the apartment building that was home to Asja's family, seriously wounding—and ultimately scarring—her. Three decades later, the two match at a speed-dating event, the guilt-ridden Zoran seeking forgiveness.

Set in the rooms of a dated and somewhat melancholic Holiday Inn hotel, the event is carefully curated. Two female hosts in leopard-printed dresses guide the participants, clad in bleak uniforms, to encourage attention to substance over looks, through a series of exercise-like games that allow them to share basic information, test dancing skills, and even play a bit of team sports. Every new exercise makes Asja address Zoran anew, using words, hands, and fists in attempts to articulate what her scarred life has felt like, physically and psychologically. Her emotions are not only laid bare before Zoran, but also the hosts and other participants, compatriots. Some resent the situation for distracting from their romantic pursuits; others do not agree that Asja's story deserves any more attention than theirs; several empathize. Zoran, by contrast, faces the impossible task of verbalizing his position: a sincere mix of repentance, a plea for forgiveness, and his circumstances as a clueless 18-year-old with hardly the option of avoiding the draft.

As an exploration of trauma and of victim and perpetrator dynamics, the plot of The Happiest Man in the World may seem naive, implying that emotional confrontation and dialogue offer psychological deliverance to both parties. However, Strugar Mitevska's recent interview for the Cineuropa web resource encourages an alternative interpretation. Here, the director has described The Happiest Man in the World as a love poem to Sarajevo, inviting the spectator to consider the film as a rhythmic exploration of the texture of the city's social fabric. Once the flagship of Yugoslav multiethnic cohesion, in this film, the city is an assemblage of intimate individual memories entangled in new processes of collectivity-formation.

Strugar Mitevska's somber, yet energetic feature—a Belgian, Bosnian, Croatian, Danish, North Macedonian, and Slovenian co-production—thus belongs to a prominent strand of post-Yugoslav cinematography concerned with collective memory from a distinctly presentist, if not future oriented perspective. Notably, the film is carefully structured around Sarajevans’ memories integrated into the deliberately open-ended script in the production process, as were some of the actors’ in situ reactions to the shooting. The palpable documentary dimension of the production process makes Strugar Mitevska's film—a dynamic map of the aspirations and efforts of psychologically complex heroes grounded in collective memories, societal norms, and economic conditions—especially striking.