New Life grew out of Grandrieux’s experience watching an American soldier, based in Kosovo, meeting a young prostitute in Sofia, Bulgaria. From this raw material emerges a film about human trafficking in a war-ravaged Eastern Europe. The purposefully minimalist narrative takes place between Melania, a young woman from the countryside now the property of a brutal pimp, and the network of men who use her as currency for a series of transactions involving sex and violence. Does the “new life” of the title refer to Melania’s induction into the sex trade, or is it perhaps a new mode of existence sketched by the film, wherein the body, liberated or enslaved within a collapsing social order, returns to an animal state? Given the difficult subject matter and the extremely elliptical plot, this is perhaps Grandrieux’s most challenging film.

Following years of making shorts and video work, Grandrieux made his feature debut with this gripping documentary drawn from his 1995 visit to Sarajevo, days after the Dayton Peace Accords. Centered around a Bosnian Muslim family who had fled the conflict in Bosnia and are returning for the first time, Grandrieux's exploration of the devastations of war offers an important backdrop for his subsequent films, particularly New Life.