Give Us Our Daily Bread (1978) is a short (14 min) colour documentary directed by Vlatko Filipović (1936-2019). The film depicts the efforts of the Red Cross in Sarajevo, in the era of socialist Yugoslavia, that provided many poor people with a cooked meal every day. The film Give Us Our Daily Bread was named the best documentary film at the 36th Yugoslav Documentary and Short Film Festival in Belgrade, and Filipović was awarded the Belgrade Grand Gold Medal.

Filipović, Yugoslav and Bosnian-Herzegovinian director and screenwriter, was one of the progenitors of the world-renowned Sarajevo School of Documentary Film and one of its prominent members. For his lifetime contribution to BiH cinema, in 2007 the Association of Film Workers of BiH awarded him the Ivica Matić Award. He authored four feature films and around forty documentaries. His films are inspired and imbued with symbols of the region he comes from, such as, in his own words, "stone, medieval tombstones, customs, mountain village, karst field, the Franciscans, the multiethnicity of Sarajevo", namely, "the symbols of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the life of people alongside those symbols". 

Bread is yet another symbol to which Filipović keeps returning again and again, his leitmotif. In his documentary The Seal of Time (2004), part of the The Neretva Saga trilogy (2000-2004), bread appears in the words of the Lord's prayer, "Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”. The prayer is spoken by the faithful, under umbrellas and wearing raincoats, inside the war-devastated church (of the Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary, located in Ravno) as the rain falls through the ruined roof. A similar symbolism in the context of war can also be found in the Fire of Sarajevo (1992), where Filipović contrasts shots of the interior of the burned Church of Mary's Ascension in Sarajevo against the ringing of bells and the voices of the faithful saying the Lord's prayer. The bread in this prayer is a symbol of the body of Christ, that takes on all our sins, but is also a symbol of forgiveness in the times of war and destruction when forgiveness is hard to find. 

Bread also appears as a symbol of fertility, contrasted against symbols of infertility (such as stone) in the documentary film Thirsty Field (1964) in which flour is milled under a millstone (manually) pushed by a woman, followed by the baking of bread under an iron bell on the fire in the home hearth. Bread that was never quite made by the end of Filipović's feature film My Side of the World (1969) serves a similar purpose, because Jakov (Izet Hajdarhodžić) rapes his wife's sister while she's making bread by milling wheat into flour under the millstone. The rapist, obsessed with the desire to have a child (son), is a symbol of infertility, diametrically opposed to the fertility symbolized by a woman making flour for the bread. 

In the film How to Kill Grieg in Sarajevo (1995), grain is not necessarily milled to make flour for bread but is used as bait to hunt pigeons to feed the hungry tenants of a building in Sarajevo (Filipović's neighbors) during the siege. In this film, bread is also the symbol of unity and tolerance between the multinational and multiethnic tenants, people of various religions (Catholics, Muslims, Orthodox) spending their war days in the basement, as they break and share the bread brought by the Orthodox neighbor. 

Similarly, bread also serves as a symbol in the short documentary film Leeward of Time (1964). The scene of the shepherd – wrapped in a woolen cloak as he steps through the blizzard, followed by a long line of sheep along a narrow path carved through deep snow – is complemented by a narrator voice-over, "Anything for wool, for cheese, for meat, for milk...". The scene changes and shows people carrying hay on their backs as they make their way through a snowstorm. They are going uphill, an undertaking almost as impossible as that of Sisyphus. The scene is highlighted by the voice of the narrator that continues as a sound bridge from the previous scene "...for bread, for our daily lives". People do manage to reach the top, then take the hay off their backs, put it on the sled and descend to their homes. Although this mountain village called Lukavac was only 30 km from Sarajevo, in the 1960s it was cut off from the world, without electricity, and its inhabitants lived as they did hundreds of years ago. Bread, therefore, symbolizes the villagers' struggle for survival, against snow and harsh weather, as well as their victory over nature.

Bread also appears as a symbol of mercy in Give Us Our Daily Bread about the Red Cross public kitchen in Sarajevo in the Yugoslav socialist era. Apart from the fact that this short documentary is a document, a critique of the society where according to the postulates of socialism everyone was supposed to be equal, yet they were not and ended up on the margins of society, it also represents the author's biased expression because it’s empathetic towards its heroes and heroines. Filipović does not condemn them for unpaid tickets while they avoid the ticket controllers on the tram on their way home with the food they received from the Red Cross. He also sympathizes with an old lady who takes a piece of sausage from her Red Cross meal and wraps it in paper to take it to her dog that’s waiting at home, hungry. She shares the loneliness and poverty with the dog, all under the watchful eye of Josip Broz Tito whose small framed colour portrait hangs in her apartment next to the sticker of Red Cross Sarajevo. Filipović also shows empathy for a larger family where the grandfather, small children and their mother are waiting for the grandmother to return from the Red Cross with a warm meal, as well as an old woman who brings food to her sick husband. Filipović visually, through editing, contrasts the users of the Red Cross public kitchen with the officials in charge of them. He contrasts poverty against abundance in a society that nominally does not have class distinctions. While the officials are whimsical, well dressed, healthy and cheerful while drinking alcohol and toasting, again under the watchful eye of Josip Broz Tito whose portrait stares from the front page of a book about his character and work by Fitzroy Maclean; users of the Red Cross public kitchen are worried, indisposed, often with visible physical injuries, such as the woman with a bump and a cut on her forehead, a man with a bandage over his eye, a man with a crooked, broken nose, or a sick Roma baby.

“Regardless of what they did, whether they were filmmakers, whether they were writers, whether they were poets, whether they were painters, whether they were peasants with whom I spoke, workers, etc., it was people that left the biggest impression on me”, Filipović said in an interview he gave in July 2009. Empathy for people and his interest in the symbols of the region he comes from permeate his films, of which Give Us Our Daily Bread is a worthy example that definitely deserves to be seen.