FEATURE FOCUS n ANGELINA JOLIE: IN THE LAND OFBLOODANDHONEY
An understanding of war
Angelina Jolie talks candidly to Mike Goodridge about the conception and making of her directorial debut, In The Land Of Blood And Honey, which has its international premiere in Berlin
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sented that way. It may seem like a strange thing for a director to feel, but I think people should be uncomfortable watching it.” The film, which receives its international
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premiere today at the Berlinale, is set in and around Sarajevo during the Bosnian War in the early 1990s, and follows a Serbian soldier (Goran Kostic) and his relationship with a Bosnian woman (Zana Marjanovic), with whom he was involved prior to the conflict. When he finds her a captive in the prison camp he oversees, he protects her from the rape and abuse that the other women suffer. But, as the war goes on, they are both led down a path of betrayal and recrimination. Jolie, who also wrote the screenplay, does
not avoid depicting the atrocities of the conflict — easy killings and routine cruelties — but her passion in bringing the story to the screen derives, she says, from a desire to understand how they could have happened.
n 26 Screen International at the Berlinale February 11, 2012
know my film is hard for people to watch, but it is intended to be so,” says Angelina Jolie of her directorial debut In The Land Of Blood And Honey. “War should be repre-
“I knew so little about the war when I was a
teenager or in my twenties. Even through all my years of working with the United Nations and talking to people at the State Department, I still couldn’t get anyone to explain to me what happened and why. “I couldn’t work out how, at that time in the
1990s, when everyone was talking about Schindler’s List and we were very focused on mass atrocities, we could go on ignoring this situation for so long and not assist these peo- ple. How did that happen?”
Disturbing situation “In every conflict, every situation dealing with man’s inhumanity to man, there are things that no rational person can understand because it doesn’t make any sense,” she continues. “But there was something very disturbing to me about this situation where neighbours turned against neighbours in a country 40 minutes away from Italy, in the 1990s.” Jolie visited the region twice in her role as
Goodwill Ambassador to the UN to meet with victims of the war, and was struck by the beauty
‘When you are face to face with people who have survived something or faced danger, it really centres you on what’s important in life and the human
condition’ Angelina Jolie
and culture of Bosnia. But when she started writing the script, she never imagined it would ever be made. “I’ve written in ‘op-ed’ form and tinkered
around with the scripts of films that I worked on, and I thought it would be interesting to try to write in a script form,” she explains. “I didn’t write it ever thinking that anybody would read it and I was doing it privately. I didn’t have much work on so I thought I would give myself this task like homework, like I was giving myself an assignment.” She used the script as an incentive to research
the war through books and documentaries. “I decided that I would start with these peo-
ple at the beginning in this country which had all this unity and mixed marriages, and was unusual and beautiful in what it stood for. And then I wanted to try to take these characters through the war, to try to understand and answer these questions: how could a woman — a mother, a sweetheart — ever get to the point where she could try to take somebody’s life? “And how could two people in love — and I thought here about the relationship with the
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