Welcome to Sarajevo

source: Welcome to Sarajevo

I did not read "Welcome to Sarajevo" until a year after seeing the movie. Therefore, as I watched this film for the first time, I was under the impression that Risto (played by Goran Visnjic) was the lead character. Yes, I know the opening actors' credits listed Goran Visnjic fifth in line, but as the movie unfolded, it was evident that Risto had the ONLY fascinating character and story line. When a sniper killed Risto, I was in shock and actually thought the movie was over. Everything shown afterward seemed anticlimactic and inessential. I think "Welcome to Sarajevo" would have been better served if it had focused more on the Risto's life: a peaceful intellectual finally forced to take up a gun to defend his city. While the film does give us snippets about Risto's life and character, more could have (and should have) been done to portray the effects of the siege on it's inhabitants. That would have been covering new ground for a British or American film. There are numerous movies depicting American and British journalist's point of views in war torn countries. What I wanted to see was the BEFORE as well as the AFTER in individual lives of the different ethnic groups caught in the besieged city. How do I rate this flick? Well, only a 7, but I give a 10 for Mr. Visnjic's performance.

Welcome to Sarajevo provides an important exploration of the events which occurred during the conflict in and around Sarajevo. Director Michael Winterbottom does an excellent job of portraying the lives and decisions of the reporters who covered the war, while also highlighting the moral dilemmas faced by all those involved. The acting is understated yet powerful, allowing the audience to feel a strong connection with those on the screen. Taken from true events, the horror on the screen is often taken from actual video of events. Many excellent artists were chosen for this film, and they seem to truly have left behind any Hollywood egoism in favor of rendering an honest depiction of situations which are easily forgotten by many in the West. The film is well intentioned, well made, and successfully highlights a difficult topic. The only fault I could see was that the film could have given a background on the different factions fighting at the beginning, explaining to those not familiar with Sarajevo exactly who the different groups were composed of. However, this would not keep me from highly recommending Welcome to Sarajevo.

This is one very strange movie for me. On the one hand, it is undeniably bad. The movie tries to tell two types of stories, first it wants bo be a movie about war journalists, like Olliver Stone's Salvador. Then, it becomes a rescue movie when the main journalist tries to evacuate a nine year old girl from the war zone. One problem is that these two stories don't hang well together at all. The journalist is totally uncharismatic. Then, there are cameos (don't let the cover fool you) of Woody Harrelson and Marisa Tomei. Very charming actors, but they don't get enough screen time. What I think happened is that the director became overraught by the fact that they were _actually_ filming in Sarajevo itself, wanted to put too many things in, and in the end forgot what his job was - namely, to tell a story. What I would have done, was focus much more on the little girl, her perspective of the war, which is much more interesting than watching some jaded journalists being jaded. Also, in the end, the war in Bosnia was about the people of Bosnia, not some parachuted in gonzos. It is in fact demeaning in itself that the people who suffered the most, are delegated to playing extras in some kind of movie that can't make up it's mind what story it wants to tell. At the same time, after focusing on the girl, I would have focused more on the Woody Harrelson character. He has a lot more going for him than the scrawny, balding lead, who's character, by the way, also isn't developed (why does he have a family back home?;What does his wife think of him flying off to the latest war zone?;Why does she accept that he does this dangerous job and in the process shacks up with Kerry Fox and Emily Lloyd?; Questions, questions...). The movie falls into the trap of, instead of telling a coherent, progressive story, wanting to mention every atrocity visited on the city of Sarajevo. However, what it has going for it, are those rare moments. At times, the movie is effective in illustrating _how_ those people came to be dead, especially with the middle aged woman who was shot dead during the wedding party/procession. The images of the concentration camps are of course harrowing, and the scenes of the market place that was mortared are gruesome. There is an effective blending of news footage and movie, to the point where at _some_ point (not immediately) you don't know what is real and what is fiction. Ok. However, this does not make for a movie. Movies have to have characters you can root for - they don't _have_ to be Western journalists. I would have rooted for the little girl. Or her mom. Or the translator. You don't have to have American actors for it to play well in America (think of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). What has to be there is a good story, told well. And it unfortunately doesn't have the latter.

On a political level, "Welcome to Sarajevo" almost comes across as pro-Muslim propaganda, thus following the official line that tags the Serbs as the bad guys and the Muslims as the victims (and the Croats as a sinister footnote). People unfamiliar with the conflict will walk away with this general assumption--especially given the common knowlege that the Serbs participated very prominently in the three other Yugoslav wars. But the war was far more complex than that, and no single film has yet to show the startling array of dimensions that fueled the violence in Bosnia in the 90s; none manages to place the violence in a historical context. "Underground" came close, and the last sequence of "Ulysses' Gaze" gave it a good try, but it wasn't really there. (Crowd favorite "Pretty Village Pretty Flame" simply wasn't a good movie, whatever its intentions might have been.) Taken together, though, a picture of Bosnia begins to emerge--one that is decidedly dire and bloody, but one that at least suggests how complex the war was. Round it out with "Vukovar" and "Cabaret Balkan" and you'll have a home video film festival guaranteed to make you kill yourself. Until someone makes a film about pre-war Sarajevo, with its vibrant multi-ethnic communities, cosmopolitan sophistication, elegant boulevards, and generous hospitality (and am I the only one who remembers the Sarajevo Olympics?), cinematic Bosnia will have to be this violent wasteland of human pride and depravity. On pure film-geek terms, "Welcome to Sarajevo" is a meandering story that doesn't really seem to know what it wants to be: is it a story about gonzo journalists, or about the rescue of a little girl, or about war atrocities? The gonzo journalist angle lasts for about a half hour, and then promptly goes away. Then there's the plot line about the rescue of the girl, which appears somewhat arbitrarily a little late in the game. Once that angle's resolved the movie keeps chugging along, with a thoroughly inconsequential return trip to Bosnia that serves little dramatic purpose except to kill off another character. The war atrocities thread runs throughout the film, but never gels into a story of its own. Given Woody Harrelson's top-billing and his grand entrance, you'd think he and his antics would be important...but they're not. Too many of the scenes go nowhere (did I have to see the bus pulling over so the kids could sleep? I think I could have figured out on my own that children sleep at night); scenes that seem important end up not being so, and some scenes that should be important are utterly forgettable. But still, the prolonged bus ride is dreadful to watch (in the good way--kids in danger, can't beat that for drama), and seeing the girl prancing about the English garden wearing a cute dress and a bow in her hair was enough to give me a sense of relief. Final note: I can understand the outrage any Serb would feel watching this film. But in a way, maybe that's the point. Everyone should be outraged. Not by the one-sided depiction of the war, but by the fact that the Serbs did commit unspeakable atrocities in Bosnia and Croatia...as did the Croats and the Muslims (yes, even the "victims" took a generous shot at being the monsters). Emira could have been from any one of those groups, and children and adults from all sides of this spectacularly multi-sided war suffered the same as she did. The only other group that gets bad-mouthed in this film is the West. Of the many participants and guilty parties in Bosnia, it is important to realize that not all were Bosnian. European and American officials gave a collective shrug and said, "Not my problem," and all those history lessons were proven to be worthless as we let the Balkan powderkeg explode once again and turned our eyes away from another Holocaust.

I saw the movie about 2-3 years ago and I was very impressed and touched. I couldn't help crying all the time. Because it was so realistic... As a Russian I faced myself the pain of the war in Chechnya, for example... I mean the feeling is close to me and I can quite understand it. All the pain which seems so indescribable is "summarized" in the movie. However, what I didn't like was a certain lack of objectiveness. I mean the political moment. In this movie the Serbs are presented as the bad guys, and the Muslims - as the victims. But the true is the opposite. Or at least, both sides were victims of this horrible conflict.

Yes, we've seen the story of the detached journalist in a war-torn country who decides not to be detached anymore several times before (UNDER FIRE, SALVADOR). The difference here, however, is at least in films like UNDER FIRE, the enemy was one side of government. Here, the enemy is apathy, because while ethnic cleansing goes on, few care, and we see Henderson (Stephen Dillane) acts not only because he's moved by the child he rescues, but because almost no one else is. The line that perfectly sums it up is when the U.N. delegate calls Sarajevo the 13th worst place in the world, and American journalist Flynn (well played by Woody Harrelson) asks what 12 cities are ahead of Sarajevo, and if it's moving up or down. I had problems with Michael Winterbottom's previous film, JUDE, because it felt like he didn't have a handle on the material. Here, however, though the story sometimes gets confusing, he is perfectly in tune with the story. A heartbreaking film.

I rented this film, having mistaken it for another, but I saw it and turned out to be quite satisfied with my foul up. Everyday since 1992 I always heard a brief narrative on the news about the troubles in Bosnia and was never quite clear what was going on until I saw this film. What made it interesting was the focus on the group of reporters, who were much more vivid and sympathetic when they first appeared. Very good performances, the soundtrack was good, but I must warn you about the cover: Marisa Tomei seems like the main star according to the box; she almost has a cameo. Good movie. I recommend it.

This movie shows me, that americans have no knowledge about the situation in the sad balkan-brother war! Please, if you want to see umpire movies with this theme, watch "Savior", and you will see that nobody is "bad"- and nobody is "good" in this land of tears and sorrows...

It seems bitterly ironic that a movie about the war in Bosnia, ignored for the most part by the West, should have been ignored by moviegoers. I don't know what happened to the distribution of this movie (perhaps there is an explanation), but I suspect that many movie-goers just don't want to be troubled by the reality of what happened in Bosnia in the years that the movie so effectively depicts -- 1992-1995. It's a crying shame, because this is a powerful, beautiful story that focuses on a British journalist who must learn how to act on his moral outrage. As a former reporter, I empathized completely with his sense of disconnectedness from the terrible events he witnesses. But as the camera moves through the burned-out rubble of the city and its surroundings, the tension builds toward his inevitable actions and makes plain the movie's moral: that even when we feel we can do almost nothing, we should do whatever tiny bit we can. The message isn't heavy-handed; it is intelligently conveyed through top-notch performances from a solid cast (Woody Harrelson is perfectly convincing as the "cowboy" American journalist) and a script that does justice to the complexity of the Bosnian situation. Real news footage is mixed quite cleverly with the invented -- so well, in some cases, that it's hard to tell them apart. This isn't an easy movie to watch but it's worthwhile for those many of us who become confused and overwhelmed by the Bosnian situation. It's a powerful reminder, too, that being informed isn't enough; action is imperative. I greatly admired this movie.