Possessed by war
AS I sat in a restaurant in downtown Budapest it felt as if I was with another reporter or aid worker I had met over the years rather than an international movie star. Angelina Jolie had just returned from the Libyan city of Misrata, which sustained one of the bloodiest battles of the civil war. It has since become a symbol of the suffering of the people there. But despite the journey, and what she had seen in the devastated city, she was not rattled. She could flip from talking about her experiences as a first-time director to discussing systematic rape in Bosnia, her trips to Darfur, or the flood of refugees in the Horn of Africa.
“When I go somewhere, I am always willing to learn about it. I get briefings, I read books, I talk to people,” she said. “But mainly I try to go somewhere to bring awareness, to come home and pick up the phone and call someone and try to get something done.”
She took this focus and directness to her new film, In the Land of Blood and Honey. She told me that when it came to the technicalities of making a film, “I wasn’t afraid to ask the DP [director of photography]. And I listened to my cast, most of whom lived through the war. I listened to their stories and tried to incorporate it into the work.” Against the backdrop of the war, she has created a moving and surprising love story of a Serbian soldier and the Bosnian woman he re-encounters ambiguously during the war. It is difficult not to admire Jolie, particularly after watching her film.
The Bosnian war erupted in the wake of the dismemberment of Yugoslavia in 1991, pitting the nascent countries Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia against each other along complicated ethnic and religious lines, and leaving an estimated 100,000 people dead.
We were still discussing its horrors at 3am when Jolie’s bodyguard popped his head in. He reminded us gently that it was late. We had been talking and drinking for eight hours; still, she insisted on walking me back to my hotel so I arrived safely. “I want to make sure you’re all right,” she said.
As a journalist who lived through the siege of Sarajevo, I saw Muslims, Serbs, and Croats who had formerly lived side by side and been friends viciously turn on each other. I witnessed the ethnic cleansing, the burning of houses, the columns of refugees pouring from the country, and, once, a dog running down the street with a human hand in its mouth. I went to see Blood and Honey with an especially critical eye. I was on the lookout for inauthentic details, since other films I have seen about Bosnia left me irritated and annoyed: Why hadn’t the director done more research? Why couldn’t someone tell the true story of the brutal war in the heart of Europe at the end of the 20th century? I emerged from Jolie’s screening impressed. How could a woman who was only 17 when the conflict in Bosnia erupted in April 1992 have so perfectly captured the horror of a war that focused largely on indiscriminate and brutal attacks on civilians? She is honest when she says: “At the time, I had no idea of the extent of the agony.”
But her work as an ambassador to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees exposed her to the plight of the Bosnian civilians and how the aftermath lingers on. The women who were raped in the infamous eastern Bosnian “rape camps” are still suffering from the emotional and traumatic fallout; it was an especially sensitive point for her. So Jolie, who has always taken on her roles with an intensity that is almost frightening, immersed herself in reading everything she could about the Bosnian war.
Jolie replicated the city of Sarajevo — which endured the longest-running siege in modern history — exactly as I remembered it. The humanitarian trucks being cruelly rocketed by Serb gunmen; the young rape victim slowly losing her mind after being held in captivity and repeatedly violated; the drunken snipers targeting a father and son running across a bridge.
Her film depicts the isolation of war. Early on in the fighting, I remember going for a walk, avoiding the Serb snipers near the Jewish cemetery on the hill, to a neighbourhood on the opposite side of the river where I lived. It was a time of intense bombing, sniping, starving, and freezing. I had witnessed old people who had been abandoned in their frontline nursing home and died in their beds. I saw kids who got rocketed for building snowmen. At the beginning of the war, America did not want to get involved; it saw the conflict as a European problem. In America it was portrayed as an intensely complicated fight between ancient enemies (Christians versus Muslims, Croats versus Serbs) and taking place in Europe’s backyard. As the fighting spread between Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia, the UN got involved, but it was not until NATO airstrikes in 1994-95 that the opposing parties were forced to the negotiating table, where the US played a major role in bringing about peace. And yet, early on, people hung American flags out their windows. “Are they coming to save us?” they asked me, tugging at my sleeves. “When are the Americans coming?” It was heartbreaking. Jolie’s film shows what it is like to be one of those people — a poet, a bank teller, a teacher, a mother — and to be transformed by the cruelty and betrayal of war. It is about what humans do to other humans to survive.
“The people felt as though the world had forgotten them,” Jolie said. “It was a time of great pain, and I wanted to depict how courageous people were — without offending anyone.”
The Bosnians desperately wanted help, from anyone, anywhere — but no one came. Even now, too few people know what happened there. Perhaps it takes the star power of someone like Jolie to remind them of this incredibly complex, bloody conflict. “It was made to remind everybody of the war — but only a small group of people will really understand,” she admitted. Which is perhaps why she decided to release the film first in the Bosnian language, with English subtitles.
The authenticity of Blood and Honey comes from talented actors from the former Yugoslavia — a mix of Serbs, Muslims, and Croats. Most of them lived through the war: many lost family members or were wounded.
The nuances Jolie brings to the film are as important as the authenticity of the actors. She understands that many of the Serb gunners were drinking a potent fruit brandy known as slivovitz throughout the war (she shows the commander having a bottle on his desk), and that the safest time to drive down Sniper’s Alley was in the morning when they were sleeping off their hangovers. She also portrays the inability of the UN peacekeepers to protect the civilian population because of their limited, and ineffective, mandate — they could fire only when they were fired upon, and technically protect only the humanitarian-aid workers, not the civilians themselves (though there were some heroic souls who broke that mandate independently because they were so disgusted by their powerlessness).
There are minor details that were hugely important — street scenes, furniture, the way Bosnian women dress and talk, their expressions.
“It was half script, half improvisation,” Jolie said of some of the scenes, and she relied heavily on local staff. She shows characters longing for food, for contact with the outside world, for books, cinema, poetry — all the things that existed before the war.
The film was not made without controversy. At one point, it was reported in Sarajevo — inaccurately, as it happens — that Jolie’s script was about a Bosnian woman who falls in love with her rapist. In fact, Blood and Honey is much more complicated. It is the love story of a couple who met before the war and a woman who is sent to the camps. But it is also a tale of betrayal, of passion, and sometimes of hope.
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