I love how western films like to depict all people from the Balkans as dirty, grimy, uneducated, homicidal, bumbling idiots. This movie is no exception. If you would like to see another movie where Serbs, Bosnians, and Croats are shown in such a manner, please watch Behind Enemy Lines.
shareWhat BS. The movie portrays refugees, and it portrays them at a moment when the war in Bosnia was still going on.
They're a mixed bag. Two are feuding men (an ethnic Serb and a Croat) from the same village. One is a couple who decide to love and raise the child who is an offspring of the wife's mass rape by enemy militiamen. One is a very sweet man who plays beautiful classical piano and happens to have taken part in war crimes.
They're all fully rounded human beings. We don't know as much about them as we might know if they weren't on somebody else's soil speaking a language not their own, and that's partly the point. Besides, the movie is just as much about the Britons who interact with them, and those are a mixed bag too. The movie is about the best of people -- their capacity for redemption and renewal and forgiveness and love.
I guess any movie about those dark events is going to be accused by you of not showing enough picnics and college lectures and picturesque Old Sarajevo, but that's fine. We'll own up to these movies you hate so much, and you can own up to the history that helped make them.
For your information, however, "Western cinema" happens to include cinema from Yugoslavia and its successor republics, and since you're too damn lazy to check for yourself, the writer/director isn't British but Bosnian:
Jasmin Dizdar won his first award when he was only twelve years old for his short story "History Hour". Following the advice of his teacher of literature, he joined the film club in his hometown Zenica (Bosnia), and made his first short film when he was eighteen. The film won a Silver Award at the Bosnian Short Film Festival. During the next six years he made fifteen short films and won eleven awards. Zenica's film club emerged from small town obscurity and flourished to become one of the top film clubs representing former Yugoslavia at international film festivals. In 1984, he began his film studies at the internationally acclaimed film school FAMU in Prague. Many world famous filmmakers were FAMU graduates: Milos Forman ("Amadeus", "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"), Jiry Menzel ("Closely Observed Trains"), Emir Kusturica ("Time of the Gypsies", "Underground"), Jan Sverak ("Kolya"). Jasmin Dizdar and Jan Sverak attended FAMU at the same time and Emir Kusturica's head teacher was a decade later Jasmin's head teacher. During his studies Jasmin wrote and directed seven short films. His two graduation films, "After Silence" (made in 1987) and "Our Sweet Homeland" (made in 1988), won awards at the student film festivals. His dissertation about film director Milos Forman, "Audition for a Director", was published as a book with an edition of fifty thousand copies in 1990. During his final years as a FAMU student, he was already living in London and writing his first screenplay "Mummy is Dead" in English. In 1992, the BBC commissioned him to write a TV drama, "Horseman", and a year later a radio play "Intimate Tragedy". In 1995, the British Film Institute commissioned him to write the screenplay for his first feature film, Beautiful People (1999). Four years later it was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, exactly twenty years after Jasmin made his first short film "Bad Dream". "Beautiful People" was awarded the Best Film in the "Un Certain Regard" category, and has been sold and distributed in almost every country in the world. Jasmin's next feature project, "China House", will go into pre-production in the autumn of 2003. He is co-writing a sci-fi feature project, "Control Normal". He has also co-written a short film, "Short Fall", which will shoot in the winter of 2003-2004 in Sicily.So much for the supposed demonization of the peoples of the Balkans by American and Western European filmmakers.
I am Serb who lives in London and when people know I am Serb they treat me just like this sometimes. Or like an immigrant who have taken from them.
"Kangaroo court of public opinion needs no proof."
I'm sure that's true.
The Republican Plan: repeal all reform; collect payoffs; go yachting (but not in the Gulf).
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