SARAJEVO: Bosnian war victims' associations on Friday hailed Angelina Jolie's directorial debut, a love story set in wartime Bosnia, as an objective and sincere portrayal of the inter-ethnic conflict.
“This movie is deeply moving for the victims who experienced all of these things,” Murat Tahirovic, who heads an association of prisoners of war, told AFP after seeing it in a special screening in Sarajevo. “It is completely objective and it really tells the facts of what happened during the war.”
The movie, “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” which the Hollywood superstar filmed in 2010, tells the love story of a Muslim woman and a Serb man set against the background of Bosnia's 1992-1995 war.
The film caused controversy in Bosnia when local media at first speculated that it was the story of a Muslim rape victim who falls in love with her Serb attacker.
The rumours prompted angry reactions from some victims' organisations, including several who have now praised the film after finally seeing it.
To allay the fears of war victims about the film, it was shown to several local representatives at a screening in Sarajevo Thursday, closed to the media and the general public.
“She really succeeded in telling the story of the whole war in her film and to show the most characteristic situations that detainees faced – mass executions, rapes, (being used as) human shields and all the other horrors,”Tahirovic said.
She explained that the film tells the history of a love, born before the conflict started, between a young Muslim woman and a Serb man who meet again later in a detention camp, where she is being held and he is in charge of the site.
However, the head of an association of victims of sexual violence during the Bosnian war who led a campaign against the movie in 2010, complained she was not invited to the screening.
“I saw pictures of the film on the Internet. I do not know what the film is about, but what I have seen is that the victim is in a five-star hotel, she paints, enjoys freedom. This did not exist!” Bakira Hasecic told AFP, visibly agitated.
In an interview published on Friday in the Bosnian daily Dnevni Avaz, Jolie said her intentions were to make a movie that would “explain to people” what had happened in Bosnia's war between its Croats, Muslims and Serbs, which claimed some 100,000 lives.
“I would never want to hurt someone who has already been hurt,” she said. Jolie added she has tried to be “correct” and not to have a “black and white view.”
“I tried to understand how humans become monsters,” she said.
The head of an association of mothers of Srebrenica massacre victims, who had earlier spoken out against Jolie after the media rumours, said the final product was “really an excellent movie”.
“It will never be possible to make a movie that would show everything that went on in Bosnia during the war,” Hatidza Mehmedovic told AFP.
“But this movie is objective and sincere. It is a difficult movie but it sends a strong message.” Mehmedovic said she wanted to “thank Angelina for her intellectual and financial investment in making this movie that will tell the world the truth about Bosnia's war.”
Bosnian Serb forces killed some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in July 1995, in the worst single massacre in Europe since World War II.
The international preview of the film took place on Monday in New York and it will open in the United States on December 23.
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