Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie has won praise from both film critics and victims’ relatives for her directing debut of ‘In the Land of Blood and Honey,’ a powerful story of love amid the atrocities of the Bosnian war.
The movie tells the story of a Serb soldier who re-meets a former lover, a Bosnian woman now held captive in the camp he oversees during the dark days of the 1992-95 Bosnian war.
The film’s cast are all local actors who lived through the conflict as the former Yugoslavia was ripped apart, and the movie was made in Bosnia and Budapest, in two languages: English and Serbo-Croatian.
British journalist Christiane Amanpour, who covered the Balkan wars including the siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo for the CNN television news network, calls the movie “really brave, very tough and courageous.”
Jolie’s attention to authentic detail in her movie presentation despite being only 17 when the war erupted, the actress said her UN ambassador role helped her develop the habit of learning in depth.
“When I go somewhere, I am always willing to learn about it. I get briefings, I read books, I talk to people,” the 36-year-old revealed.
Hatidza Mehmedovic, head of an association of mothers of Srebrenica massacre victims, the 8,000 Muslim men and boys killed by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995, also paid tribute to the US actress.
aThe movie is due to be released in a limited number of theaters in the United States on December 23, and in the Netherlands, Turkey, Belgium and France in February.