Bosnian Victims Heap Praise on Jolie’s Wartime Drama

Angelina Jolie’s directorial debut In the Land of Blood and Honey about the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia, has won plaudits from the likes of correspondent Christiane Amanpour who attended its red carpet premiere in New York City last week.

But another group of critics whose voice Jolie values have also given overwhelmingly positive reviews. 

Civilian victims of the war, including concentration camp survivors and rape survivors who saw the movie on December 8, say Jolie has captured the horrors they experienced during and after the war.

“From the moment the film began, I was back in April 1992, my life passed through this film completely,” Enisa Salcinovic, president of the women’s section of the Association of Concentration Camp Survivors, told Balkan Insight just after watching the film.

Salcinovic said the movie was so traumatic, because of its accurate rendering of her own experience, that she vomited after seeing it. 

She conveyed her thanks to Jolie, a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations, for bringing the pain and suffering of an estimated 20,000-50,000 women victims of rape back into the spotlight 16 years after the conflict in Bosnia ended.

“Angelina has touched our souls,” she said.

The movie centers on the relationship between a young couple, Ajla, played by Zana Marjanovic, and Danijel, played by Goran Kostic, whose romance blossoms at the outbreak of the war that later tears them apart. 

Ajla is interned in a concentration camp and Danijel becomes her prison guard. The preview shows the couple having tense intercourse.

It was rumours about the fictional captor/captured relationship that caused such a furor last year, resulting in the revocation of Jolie’s permit to film in Bosnia.

Some of those who had been against the film, like Murat Tahirovic, president of the Association of Concentration Camp Survivors, said had they known the film would be this good, they would not have lobbied against it.

But one of the film’s most vocal critics, Bakira Hasecic, president of Women Victims of War Association, continues to campaign against the film. 

She was not invited to the screening but claims that the previews solidified the position she took last year, which resulted in Jolie having to film the rest of the movie in Hungary.

“From the clips from the movie, and I could not even watch the full two minutes, what she has done is hard and disgusting,” she told Balkan Insight.

“It became painful to watch, and still is. I felt like I was beaten, tortured and raped again, as if I had again returned to the camp, as if they’d raped me again. It is shameful!”

However, Sadzida Hadzic, a member of her organization who attended the screening, said she now supports the movie and profoundly identified with its main character.

“I am Ajla,” she told Balkan Insight.  “This is what I went through in the rape camp in Vlasenica [in eastern Bosnia] in 1992.”

Those who saw the film says that Angelina well understood not only the wartime conflict but the rich culture of the old Yugoslavia before the war. 

“The story itself was not really a love story, but it represents the love that people had before the war and the reality before the war, and how that reality changed during the war,” Elmina Kulasic told Balkan Insight. “The complex nature of love itself was very well presented.”

Kulasic, a native of the northern Bosnian town of Kozarac, was only seven when she was interned in the Serb-run Trnopolje detention camp for over a month.

Praise for the film crosses ethnic lines.  One of the guests at the screening was Dragisa Andric, a Bosnian Serb who now leads the Association of Prisoners From Visegrad. 

“This is the most difficult film that I have seen in my entire life,” Andric told Balkan Insight.

“I was barely able to watch it until the end. Even a day later, I feel like a boxer after the fight, having come out of the ring,” he said. “I am deeply moved by it because many scenes that I lived through myself,” he added. 

Andric, who was held as a prisoner by the mainly Bosniak [Muslim] Bosnian Army, said the film is a must-see, especially for young people.

“People, especially young people and those who did not experience the war, must watch this film to see what war brings, that is, nothing good. They must realize war is an evil, so that it never happens again,” he said.

However, other leaders of Bosnian Serb victims associations have asked the government of Republika Srpska, RS, Bosnia’s predominantly Serb entity, to completely ban screenings of the movie in the entity. 

Branislav Dukic, the President of the RS Association of Detainees  told reporters that he is “exasperated by the fact that the Serbs once again assigned the role of main villain,” and pledged he and other members of his organization would lobby the RS government to ban the film.  

Dukic has not seen the film, but said “the response from Bosniak associations and their enthusiasm testify that the main message of this film is to re-charge the Serbs as the sole culprits for the war.”

Rajko Vasic, Executive Secretary of the RS’s dominant party SNSD said that although he believes the film represents “homage to the suffering of Bosniaks, filmed by Hollywood pattern, in which Serbs, almost without exception, shown in the worst light,” the government will not ban the film because his entity “has outgrown savage Balkan primitivism that was evident in the government of Sarajevo’s controversial decision to ban the shooting  of this film.”

Kulasic acknowledges the fact that the movie will not be well-received all over BiH, saying it has raised an important discussion  about the future of ethnically divided Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“The movie will force us think of the future. Do we want our grandchildren to have the same conflict or a similar conflict because we have not resolved these issues?”

Velma Saric, founder and director of the Center for Post-Conflict Research, told Balkan Insight she hopes that the movie will concentrate attention on the hardships that victims of rape, some of whom receive no state benefits, still experience. 

She recalled a pioneer movie from 2006, Grbavica, about a woman raising a daughter who is the product of wartime rape, which tackled a taboo issue.

That film “did more than any politician to help victims of rape.  Only after the movie came out did our government recognize women who suffered sexual violence as civilian victims of war,” she said.

 “[Filmmaker Jasmila] Zbanic’s movie started the whole discussion,” she added.

“That is why I believe artistic expression can be stronger than workshops, symposiums, and other things organized by the international community.

“It can affect people and create strong reactions.  I expect this movie to do the same,” Saric concluded.

This article is funded under the BICCED project, supported by the Swiss Cultural Programme.