Can Angelina Jolie get people to see one of her movies if she isn’t actually in it? Jolie’s feature film debut as a director, In the Land of Blood and Honey, will reveal whether the world’s most famous movie star has as much command over the screen behind the camera as she does in front of it. But despite the fact that Jolie doesn’t appear in the film, it’s very much her vision. She came up with the story and wrote the script, and the subject, the Bosnian war that devastated the Balkans in the ’90s, is something of an extension of her efforts as a U.N. goodwill ambassador, for which she has participated in dozens of humanitarian missions in such ragged places as Afghanistan and Namibia to advocate on behalf of refugees.
In the Land of Blood and Honey unflinchingly depicts all the brutality and horrors of the years of armed conflict, ethnic cleansing, mass rape, and a population under endless siege. Framed within that chaos is the story of Danijel (Goran Kostic) and Ajla (Zana Marjanovic), who had a relationship before the war and now find themselves on opposite sides of the conflict. The cast of unknowns, including Kostic and Marjanovic, many of whom experienced the war as young people, may not add Hollywood star power to the project, but they lend the film something perhaps of greater value: authenticity. Jolie felt a responsibility to get their story right, and wants the film, regardless of its critical reception, to serve as a conversation restarter about Bosnia, and, implicitly, to get people to think of that war against the relative successes and failures of other, more recent American interventions abroad.
Taking on a hot-button political topic has not been without its risks, even for someone with Jolie’s connections. Permission to shoot in Sarajevo in fall 2010 was briefly denied after the Bosnian group Women Victims of War claimed that the plot depicted a Bosnian female prisoner falling in love with the man who tortured her-a situation deemed unthinkable and distressing to survivors. After Bosnian officials read the script, the crew was allowed to shoot in the country’s capital, though most of the action was filmed in Hungary, where Jolie, 36, has spent much of the past year. She was in Budapest, where partner Brad Pitt was filming his zombie flick World War Z, when she spoke with Clint Eastwood, a filmmaker who is no stranger to the cinema of violence and tragedy. He directed Jolie in Changeling (2008), and the two hope to collaborate again someday. Read the rest of this entry…
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