Angelina Jolie's first efforts as a writer and director was recently released in the US. Set in Bosnia during the 1990s war, it is a love story between a Bosnian Serb who ends up as a prison guard to his Bosnian Muslim former girlfriend.
It caused all sorts of furore when Angelina went to shoot it in Bosnia. Many Bosnian Muslim women felt that to write a love story in such a setting trivialised their own experiences in the camps where rape was systemically used as an instrument of war. The Bosnian Serb TV production company, Pink, refused to let Angelina Jolie use their production studios, saying they were fed up with the Bosnian Serbs always being represented as the bad guys.
There was a screening in Bosnia of the film in early December and it has predictably split opinion. I want to see the film (to spot locations it was filmed at if nothing else) but I'm feeling very conflicted about it. As Bosnia lurches from political crisis to political crisis and the possibility of a return to conflict grows, a reminder to their younger generation of the dreadful terrible reality of war is no bad thing. Yet the war in Bosnia is so recent and for those people who actually lived through these events, this film must be an awful reminder of how their lives changed.