Bem-Vindo a Sarajevo

I'm just writing this review to point one thing out, the true story of Michael Nicholson (whom this movie is based off) involves him adopting and rescuing a Serbian girl named Natasha, not a Bosnian (Muslim) girl named Emira. Plenty of Serbian's themselves died in the siege of Sarajevo as we made up over 1/3 of the cities population. I'm not sure what the motive was behind switching the girl's ethnicity but I can only suspect that it was motivated by Hollywood's desire to uncomplicate a complicated mess as well as pander to public consensus that Serbs were the aggressors and the 'bad' guys while Bosniaks (Muslims) were the victims, 'good' guys.

As far as the artistic merits of the movie herself, I liked how she interwove real footage with fiction, blurring the distinction. I also found it refreshing that such a marginal topic was brought to the big studios even though no one really watched. In the end though, the movie was okay, maybe even good but not great. The acting was fairly flat and the character development was mostly two dimensional. When the movie finishes, you forget about it.

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.

Although this movie makes a nice film about the heart-wrenching situation in Bosnia-Hercegovina, it should not be taken for it's portrayal of a current event. The movie seems to have been made as a historical film (a la "The Killing Fields")but instead failed due to its one sided portrayal of the situation. The film ignores the truth of a country that has gone wrong, but instead blames a certain group who terrorizes another. Both sides lost by participating in a war which this film often overlooks. It was OK in the sense of entertainment value but no awards who overlooked this film made a mistake either. If you want to watch a quality film on the situation, watch "Pretty Village, Pretty Flame" (Lepo Selo Lepo Gore); it fulfills what "Welcome to Sarajevo" lacks.

At the beginning I should mention that I live in Sarajevo, and I was a civilian in a besieged city, so that explains my perspective from which I was watching this movie, and experience I carry from it.

Through the whole movie, one thing kept torturing me: What is this movie about??? Is it about Michael Henderson and his moral issues, is it about all journalists and their moral issues, is it about Flynn and his understanding of war, is it about worlds' understanding of that war, is it about Sarajevo, about Emira, about orphans? This movie needs focusing on one goal, because this way I'm left with 100 stories that don't actually fit together and I don't know what I was watching the past 1,5 hours. Pictures of war make their message very clear, but then its messed up with the story that tries to cover too many things at the same time. So is it fiction? Well, no. Is it a documentary? Well, no, not that either...

Most places shown in the move are totally wrong. Characters keep jumping from one end of the city to another in matters of seconds, some events that really happened are shown in wrong places, many times characters enter streets that in real life were sniper alleys etc. (meaning no way one could get near and stay alive), military checkpoints are mostly in the wrong places and so on, but one can forgive details like that.

Welcome to Sarajevo is trying to show you how it was, living in Sarajevo under siege, but its constantly missing the point and showing the wrong things. If you want to know how it looked like, watch a documentary.

To date the only realistic movie about Bosnian war is No Man's Land, and that would be my highest recommendation. Other than that, Lepa sela lepo gore is worth watching.

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.