A Look Back At Bosnia, Through Angelina Jolie's Eyes
January 19, 2012
Angelina Jolie was just 16 when the war in Bosnia began, and she acknowledges now that she paid little heed to it at the time. But as her awareness of international issues later took shape, her attention was drawn back to that Balkan conflict."I wanted to understand," she says. "I was so young, and I felt that this was my generation; how do I not know more?" That interest led Jolie to choose the Bosnian war as the subject of In the Land of Blood and Honey, her debut film as a writer and director.
As someone who covered Bosnia, I appreciate Jolie's interest in highlighting the war again at a time when it has mostly faded from the public consciousness. The conflict, which set Serb and Croat nationalist forces against the Muslim-led Bosnian government, was characterized by gross violations of human rights, and it made a mockery of allegedly European values — in the very heart of Europe.
This was the war that popularized the term "ethnic cleansing," a euphemism for the forced transfer of populations purely on the basis of their ethnic background or religion. Between 20,000 and 50,000 women were raped during the war, leading to the first prosecution of rape on its own as a crime against humanity. Many of us who covered the war felt it deserved more attention than it got.
I was a little
child, and for me ... everything was so huge, the bombs and the guns.
... Some details just stuck in your head, and you want to move [them],
but they just stay with you.
In order to make her film as fair and accurate as possible, Jolie needed to familiarize herself with Bosnian culture, down to the drinking habits and the linguistic peculiarities in a country where the different sides speak essentially the same language but cling to the notion that their dialects are unique. She met with Bosnians on all sides and heard their stories firsthand. She read books and consulted with some of the key characters from that conflict, like U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke. She talked to journalists who covered the war, me included.
Perhaps most important, she cast her film entirely with actors from the former Yugoslavia, all of whom brought their own war experience to the project.
Alma Terzic, who grew up in a Muslim family in the central Bosnian town of Zenica, was just 5 years old when war broke out.
"I was a little child, and for me ... everything was so huge, the bombs and the guns," Terzic said during a panel discussion among the cast members and Jolie last month in New York, at the premiere of Jolie's film. "And I remember the smell. Some details just stuck in your head, and you want to move [them], but they just stay with you."
In the movie, Terzic plays a Bosnian Muslim woman who is imprisoned with other Muslim women and repeatedly raped by Bosnian Serb forces. In her own case, however, the most traumatic experience in the war came when soldiers from the Muslim-led Bosnian government broke into her house and forced her father to go with them to fight the Serbs. Terzic, her mother, and her sister were left on their own.
"I remember how hungry we were," Terzic recalled, "and my mother's hair going white after they took my father."
Half of my house was gone, destroyed, behind my back. One [piece of] shrapnel went through my leg, through the muscle.
"I was so afraid of basements," she said, "because I didn't know what was happening. As soon as the shelling starts, I go out, which is completely, of course, not rational."
Many Sarajevans came to believe what would happen to them was strictly a matter of fate. As it turned out, the one time Glodjo got wounded during the war was on a day when she stayed inside.
"Half of my house was gone, destroyed, behind my back," she recalled. "One [piece of] shrapnel went through my leg, through the muscle."
The main Serb character in Jolie's film is a soldier torn between his affection for a Muslim woman and his loyalty to his father, a general in the Bosnian Serb army, leading his forces into combat against the Bosnian Muslims and their allies. The role is played by Goran Kostic, who also brought his personal experience to the performance.
Because she had not herself been in Bosnia during the war, Angelina Jolie had to rely on the accounts of others in her movie In The Land Of Blood And Honey.
In the film, his character heeds his father's wishes and joins him fighting on the Bosnian Serb side. Kostic himself, however, did not follow his father's military lead, choosing instead to move to London and escape the war. But he had no trouble identifying with the Serb soldier he was asked to portray and with the personal dilemma the soldier faced.
"It was easy to look at it ... and say there are so many similarities here," Kostic noted. "[I said,] 'I can easily get into that emotional landscape between my father in real life and the father in the film itself.'"
Ermin Sijamija had precisely the opposite acting challenge. In Jolie's film, he plays an especially brutal Serb soldier. But in real life he fought with his fellow Muslims on the Bosnian government side. "I was in the war, I was in the fight. I was in combat. I saw my friends dying in my hands," he told the audience. "I saw all the bad things."
My dad at the
time was a Serbian officer in the Serbian army, [with] the rank of
general. That was my destiny — to become a soldier myself.
And then there were the sticklers for accuracy on more mundane points.
One Serb man pulled Jolie aside and told her about the concerns of his fellow Serb actors. "And, of course, they were all 6 foot 4, striking-looking men, and [it was] my first day, and I'm nervous and trying to direct them," Jolie recalls. "And they're saying, 'Miss, we need to talk to you.'"
"And they said, 'First of all, we never say, 'Sir.' You have us saying 'Sir' through the whole script. Serbs don't say 'Sir.' And we don't drink tea. We never drink tea.' And I had this whole thing about Turkish coffee," Jolie says, laughing, "and of course that's politically incorrect in the region, which I didn't realize. So I said, 'It's Turkish coffee,' and [they said,] 'No, no, it's Serbian coffee.'"
Jolie says her actors helped make her film more authentic. Still, there was much she had to figure out on her own. Jolie did not know the details of Alma's father being dragooned to fight on the Muslim side, nor, she says, did she know exactly what Sijamija had gone through as a Bosnian soldier.
"He was the silent guy through the entire film," Jolie says. "The entire production, he never spoke. He was just elegant, always doing his job. I heard he had been in the military, but I never wanted to ask him, because I knew it was painful. So I didn't sit him down and drill him about it. I just had a feeling, and I could tell by the way he did the military scenes that he was familiar with weapons, but I never wanted to ask."
I was in the war, I was in the fight. I was in combat. I saw my friends dying in my hands. I saw all the bad things.
In the Land of Blood and Honey was shot in both English and Serbo-Croatian versions, and Jolie and her producers had struggled with the need to settle on a script translation agreeable to all sides.
"Some people objected to the first one as leaning too far in one direction," she says, "so we did another. And then someone objected to that one as leaning too far the other way. We always had to find a middle ground. Any time I could get them all to agree, I knew it was the middle ground. So we would go back and forth until everybody agreed. That was the complexity of it. Somebody constantly whispering into your ear, 'We don't do this,' and somebody else saying, 'They absolutely do that.'"
Not surprisingly, Jolie says she's been more concerned over how her movie would be received in Bosnia and Serbia than in New York or Los Angeles. Those local audiences are the ones who will tell her if her portrayal of the conflict was, in their view, fair and accurate.
Her multiethnic cast in the end was happy with it. The film has already had an initial screening in Bosnia's capital, Sarajevo, and it was well-received there. The official premiere in Belgrade, Serbia's capital, is set for next month.
Man-Made Tragedies, Angelina Jolie, and Women
Jan 16 2012, 11:44 AM ET
During the crush that Angelina Jolie endured and seemed to enjoy for hours, elder woman after elder woman recounted in whispers stories of the trauma their families or relatives had experienced during either the Holocaust of World War II or the genocidal atrocities that occurred during the Bosnia War.
I haven't yet sorted out all of the intense feelings generated by watching the new Angelina Jolie written and directed film, In the Land of Blood and Honey, but I will have something up soon.
The film is still haunting my thoughts -- but during the after party which went longer than any policy issue-oriented, mostly heterosexual after-event I have been to in a long time (that is to say that 'policy events' with my gay crowd always go late), I got the chance to chat with the film's director and to eavesdrop unintentionally on conversations Jolie was having with others at the Holocaust Museum.
During the crush that Angelina Jolie endured and seemed to enjoy for hours,
elder woman after elder woman recounted in whispers stories of the
trauma their families or relatives had experienced during either the
Holocaust of World War II or the genocidal atrocities that occurred
during the Bosnia War. I heard many talking about brothers and cousins
and children who lived in the forest during the Bosnia conflict -- and
inevitably, the discussions -- so many of them -- came down to the abuse
of women, their systematic rape, and other horrors that were pressed on
them.
Frequently, Jolie and the women she spoke to would comment about what a different world it would be if women were running the show, were more empowered. Wars like this, they said, "would not happen."
I'm not sure that ultimately this view is correct. Margaret Thatcher, as we are reminded of in Meryl Streep's award-winning performance in Iron Lady, was no peacenik.
But what I do think is dead-on right is that around the world, the real nut cases that rise to power and decide to use war and killing as a tool of their further ambitions are nearly always men. And as part of their rise, they make the further subordination and harassment of women a key part of their playbook.
The
US is making major strides in the right direction in the equalization
of the "state of men" and "state of women" as argued by Hanna Rosin in her cover story on the subject in The Atlantic -- but much of the rest of the world lags.
Thus, awareness-wrangling is important elsewhere and political cartoons can generate a viral edginess that inspires and empowers others to insist on equality. The Center for International Private Enterprise recently held an international competition of political cartoons in three categories -- democracy, corruption, and gender equality.
Here is a link to the cartoon that won the gender equality prize as well as other category winners, and here is a link that gets you to the semifinalists. And for those who want to go a step further, here is a pdf of the interesting media package that includes bios and quotes from various of the cartoonists.
The entry pasted above of the world on the back of an old cleaning woman evoked the strongest response from me -- and was one of the semifinalists in gender equality. It was done by El Tiempo (Columbia)'s political cartoonist Alberto Barreto. This cartoon, at least in my reading of it, depicts the doubled down abuse that women worldwide endure. First, they are expected to do the tasks many men won't do, holding the world and countries and their homes and communities together -- while nonetheless being looked down upon.
Other cartoons in the mix may move readers of this note more than the one I have selected, but as a person who doesn't write much about gender issues -- the power and solemnity of many of the post-film chats I heard Jolie have with women who have dealt with so much man-made tragedy got me thinking about this.
More on this powerful film soon. And yes, you should see it -- but expect to be pounded.
Steve Clemons is Washington editor at large for The Atlantic and editor in chief of Atlantic Live. He writes frequently about politics and foreign affairs.
“I’m nervous,” Angelina Jolie said in a small voice. “I’ve never been nervous about a film.”
This film is different.
“In the Land of Blood and Honey,” a searing fictional account of life during the Bosnian War of the 1990s, is Jolie’s directorial debut. It is a hard movie to watch.
“It should be, because war is horrible,” Jolie told us during a recent phone interview. The film was nominated for a Golden Globe award in the foreign language category; “A Separation,” about Iran, won in that category.
Jolie and her partner Brad Pitt struck a glamorous pose on the Golden Globes red carpet but didn’t stick around long after the event ended. She told Hollywood Life they aimed to get home early to their kids.
For our interview and no doubt others she has conducted promoting “Blood and Honey,” personal questions were off-limits.
“It’s been really nice” not to be asked about the subjects that would delight a tabloid-magazine audience, Jolie said. “At the end of the day we do have a responsibility to educate ourselves. I just hope people feel and want to learn. I really care about this part of the world and these people. Hopefully, artistically I won’t disappoint them.”
The film’s two main characters are Danijel (Goran Kostić), a Bosnian Serb police officer, and Ajla (Zana Marjanović), a Bosnian Muslim artist, shown at left in this movie still. Before the conflict erupts they’re depicted as a casually dating couple who enjoy music and dancing. After brutal ethnic cleansing sweeps through Sarajevo, they meet again. This time Danijel is commanding a camp where Ajla and dozens of other women are held captive and raped regularly by soldiers.
“I was born in Sarajevo and was only 8 years old during the war,” Marjanović said in a statement released by the studio. “My father chose to stay in Sarajevo. The war came as a huge surprise, and no one thought the war would last as long as it did.”
Work on the movie began with one of the most violent scenes, in which women who have been seized at gunpoint from their homes have been transported to a prisoner camp.
“The first day we did the scene where the men pull the women off the bus and the rape scene,” Jolie said. “It was really hard. I didn’t know if that morning was going to be volatile. I didn’t know if people were going to fight.”
Instead, action in between takes was inspiring. The actors who played soldiers picked up the actresses who played their captives, comforting them and brushing snow off their clothes.
“It was really beautiful,” Jolie said.
An Academy Award winner and Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees who balances an acting career and parenthood with global humanitarian work, Jolie stayed behind the camera for this project. The “Blood and Honey” cast members are actors from the region, and their memories of life during the struggle informed the movie.
“Cast members were showing pictures from before the war. One cast member showed me where she used to ski; then it became a snipers’ ridge,” Jolie said. “All the actors remembered that was their last happy moment.”
War in the former Yugoslavia followed the collapse of Communism and raged from 1992 to 1995, when NATO intervention finally stopped the fighting. The conflict claimed more than 100,000 and displaced more than 2 million people.
Jolie uses a number of expository scenes to refresh viewers’ memories about the Bosnian War. A conversation between Danijel and his father, Gen. Nebojsa Vukojevich (Rade Šerbedžija), feels like a history lesson as the older man recounts the centuries of strife that have plagued the region. Later, when Vukojevich encounters Ajla, he shares the story of his mother’s own murder at the hands of Muslim forces a generation ago.
“Instead of pointing fingers, we have to understand what went wrong to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Jolie said. “I tried to write something I thought was balanced and didn’t try to lay judgment. It’s not a documentary. It’s not a political statement. It’s a dramatic film that deals with human beings.”
It’s not yet clear when the movie will be screened in Atlanta. It depicts graphic violence and the physical and emotional scars left by war, but it is not entirely bleak. The redemptive power of creative expression emerges as a theme among the rubble.
“It is symbolic that Alya was an artist. Art to these people is part of their lifelife,” Jolie said. “The message is we’re still creating, we’re still human.”
- Jennifer Brett/The Buzz/jbrett@ajc.com
Wed, January 18, 2012
Angelina Jolie's directorial debut: In the Land of Blood and Honey
by Ariana Pekary, producer
Angelina Jolie’s new film, In the Land of Blood and Honey, has been a personal undertaking – and a risk. For the first time, Jolie’s not in front of the camera, she’s behind it. The actress says she never wanted to be a director, but the story evolved out of her desire to learn more about the conflict in Bosnia, and ta-dah: she had a script. So she used her stardom for good and Jolie now has her dramatic directorial debut.
In case you’re skeptical that this actress known for her big budget blockbuster hits was being too ambitious to direct her first film in a foreign land with foreign speakers, on a very serious subject of trust and loyalty, set during a war, then you might find that skepticism misplaced. The cast is phenomenal – you care about them immediately. Plus, the story is compelling and interesting: can this Muslim woman, who is being held captive as a prisoner of war, where rape is used as a weapon, really feel love for the man who is now responsible for her imprisonment? It’s surprisingly gritty and subtle at the same time, if a little far-fetched in places (how the main character reconnected with her sister so easily still makes me scratch my head). Nonetheless, you will stick with the story until then end. Bob interviewed Jolie in a hotel suite in DC (that’s him with producer Dan Bloom) and as he says, the film is “superb.”
Now, for a little fun trivia. You might never have heard of two made-for-TV movies featuring Jolie early in her acting career, even if she did win Golden Globes for them both. George Wallace was released in 1997 and Gia was released in 1998. That film starred Jolie as the supermodel Gia Marie Carangi who partied too hard during the 70s and 80s and ultimately died in 1986 after contracting AIDS.
Angelina Jolie’s new film, In the Land of Blood and Honey, has been a personal undertaking – and a risk. For the first time, Jolie’s not in front of the camera, she’s behind it. The actress says she never wanted to be a director, but the story evolved out of her desire to learn more about the conflict in Bosnia, and ta-dah: she had a script. So she used her stardom for good and Jolie now has her dramatic directorial debut.
In case you’re skeptical that this actress known for her big budget blockbuster hits was being too ambitious to direct her first film in a foreign land with foreign speakers, on a very serious subject of trust and loyalty, set during a war, then you might find that skepticism misplaced. The cast is phenomenal – you care about them immediately. Plus, the story is compelling and interesting: can this Muslim woman, who is being held captive as a prisoner of war, where rape is used as a weapon, really feel love for the man who is now responsible for her imprisonment? It’s surprisingly gritty and subtle at the same time, if a little far-fetched in places (how the main character reconnected with her sister so easily still makes me scratch my head). Nonetheless, you will stick with the story until then end. Bob interviewed Jolie in a hotel suite in DC (that’s him with producer Dan Bloom) and as he says, the film is “superb.”
Now, for a little fun trivia. You might never have heard of two made-for-TV movies featuring Jolie early in her acting career, even if she did win Golden Globes for them both. George Wallace was released in 1997 and Gia was released in 1998. That film starred Jolie as the supermodel Gia Marie Carangi who partied too hard during the 70s and 80s and ultimately died in 1986 after contracting AIDS.
