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giogio at 08:28am on 04/02/2007
giogio at 08:28am on 04/02/2007I watched Welcome to Sarajevo last night.1 It was very, very well-edited, mixing acted/fictional story with actual news footage from the war, a lot of it not very flattering to the West. There's a great scene where news footage of an international delegation visiting the besieged city and stating that international forces will not interfere because "there are 14 places in the world worse than Sarajevo" is mixed with Woody Harrelson shouting from the corps of reporters covering the visit, "Can you tell us what the 14 worse places are and whether we're moving up or down that list?"2
Which covers the general mood very nicely, I think, as does the scene in which the Sarajevan driver (Goran Visnjic before ER) for the main character stops the car and says, "And now we are going to play Sarajevo's favorite game." "What's that," the ITN reporter asks, and the driver replies, "It's called, 'Is there a God?'"3
My only caveat would be that the film was shot on location in Bosnia and Croatia only a few months after the ceasefire when the entire region was still freshly destroyed, which makes the devastation much more immediate than the photographs I posted of my drive from Mostar to Bihac in 2001, and because of that, and the fact that it uses news footage very liberally (including some of genocide), it might be too much for some.
1Yes, I'm ten years behind schedule and in the right headspace to watch it now... I don't particularly want to talk about that part.
2The unofficial explanation for that rating, as far as we were concerned, always was that Bosnia had no natural oil reserves.
3The answer to that, in my experience, has been that you came out the other side of the conflict either believing more fervently than you ever had before or not at all... which is what my mother hates more than anything else about the Mostar we started visiting after--the veiled girls that had never been veiled before.
Which covers the general mood very nicely, I think, as does the scene in which the Sarajevan driver (Goran Visnjic before ER) for the main character stops the car and says, "And now we are going to play Sarajevo's favorite game." "What's that," the ITN reporter asks, and the driver replies, "It's called, 'Is there a God?'"3
My only caveat would be that the film was shot on location in Bosnia and Croatia only a few months after the ceasefire when the entire region was still freshly destroyed, which makes the devastation much more immediate than the photographs I posted of my drive from Mostar to Bihac in 2001, and because of that, and the fact that it uses news footage very liberally (including some of genocide), it might be too much for some.
1Yes, I'm ten years behind schedule and in the right headspace to watch it now... I don't particularly want to talk about that part.
2The unofficial explanation for that rating, as far as we were concerned, always was that Bosnia had no natural oil reserves.
3The answer to that, in my experience, has been that you came out the other side of the conflict either believing more fervently than you ever had before or not at all... which is what my mother hates more than anything else about the Mostar we started visiting after--the veiled girls that had never been veiled before.
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