Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie has won praise for her directing debut – a powerful story of love amid the atrocities of the Bosnian war – from both film critics and victims’ relatives. The Hollywood A-lister is used to being feted for her performances in films ranging from ‘Girl, Interrupted’ – which won her the best supporting actress Academy Award in 2000 – to the ‘Lara Croft: Tomb Raider’ movies.
But she has also been an ambassador for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees since 2001, and has drawn on that experience in the making of ‘In the Land of Blood and Honey’, due out in the United States later this month. The movie tells the story of a Serb soldier who re-meets a former lover, a Bosnian woman now held captive in the camp he oversees during the dark days of the 1992-95 Bosnian war.
“It’s very difficult to make me sit and see this for two hours, it’s so hard to watch, so you can imagine living it for years, as many of our cast did,” she told reporters. “We want people to feel what it is like to live in war, and we also want to people who watch this movie to pray that … something will stop this,” she added.
The film’s cast are all local actors who lived through the conflict as the former Yugoslavia was ripped apart, and the movie was made in Bosnia and Budapest, in two languages: English and Serbo-Croatian. British journalist Christiane Amanpour, who covered the Balkan wars including the siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo for the CNN television news network, calls the movie “really brave, very tough and courageous.” In a recent interview, Jolie said the Bosnian conflict was “our generation’s war”.
The film has also won praise from Bosnian war victims’ groups. ‘In the Land of Blood and Honey’ is due to be released in a limited number of theatres in the United States on December 23, and in the Netherlands, Turkey, Belgium and France in February.
