Post by mochakitty on Dec 25, 2011 4:58:15 GMT -4
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In the Land of Blood and Honey @ IMDb.com
In the Land of Blood and Honey is a film depicting a love story set against the background of the Bosnian War. It is also the first feature film and directorial debut of actress Angelina Jolie and stars Zana Marjanović, Goran Kostić, and Rade Šerbedžija. The film was limited released in the United States on December 23, 2011.
Premise
The film is set in Sarajevo and surrounding areas before and during the Bosnian War. Danijel (Goran Kostić), a soldier fighting for the Bosnian Serbs, re-encounters Ajla (Zana Marjanović), a Bosniak woman he was involved with before the war, and who is now a captive in the camp he oversees. Their once promising connection has become ambiguous as their motives have been changed by the conflict.
Cast
Goran Kostić - Danijel
Zana Marjanović - Ajla
Rade Šerbedžija - Nebojša Vukojević
Vanessa Glodjo - Lejla
Nikola Đuričko - Darko
Branko Đurić - Aleksandar
Feđa Štukan - Petar
Alma Terzic - Hana
Jelena Jovanova - Esma
Ermin Bravo - Mehmet
Production
Jolie got the idea to write a script of a war-time love story after traveling to Bosnia and Herzegovina as a U.N. goodwill ambassador. After finishing the screenplay, she secured a production team and financing for the project that was being called "Untitled Bosnian Love Story." When it came down for the production team to chose a director, Jolie realized she herself wanted to direct. When casting calls and auditions were held, her name was deliberately withheld from all aspects of the project. When it was revealed to the cast that Angelina Jolie wrote the script, a number of them expressed pleasant surprise.
In July 2010 with the film already in pre-production, the producers approached the Serbian tycoon and media magnate Željko Mitrović over the usage of the sounds stages and studio sets owned by his Pink International Company's subsidiary Pink Films International in Šimanovci. However, he refused to do business with them, releasing a press statement: "I've held great affection and admiration for Angelina Jolie both as a person and as an artist, but unfortunately she's full of prejudice against the Serbs. I do not wish to be part of something that for the umpteenth time presents the Serbs as eternal bad guys".
The film was shot in Budapest and Esztergom during October and November 2010. The cast were entirely local actors from various parts of former Yugoslavia, many of whom lived through the war. Jolie said she spoke with the cast about their experiences during the war and tried to incorporate them into the film. The film was also shot in two versions – one in English, the other in the local language.
Jolie explained the reason she wrote and directed the film was to rekindle attention for the survivors of a war that took place in recent history. In an interview with Christiane Amanpour Jolie said she felt a responsibility to learn about the conflict in great detail, adding, "This was, you know, the worst genocide since World War II in Europe ... What were we all doing? And did we do enough? And why do we not speak about this enough?"
During the shooting of the film, it was falsely reported that the story was about a Bosnian woman falling in love with her Serbian rapist, prompting protests from the Bosnian Women Victims of War association and the revocation of the filming permit. Jolie denied the rumors and presented the script to Bosnia's ministry of culture, which then quickly reinstated the permit.
Plagiarism suit
In September 2011, Bosnian Croat author Josip Knežević aka James J. Braddock accused Jolie of plagiarizing his story Slamanje duše (The Soul Shattering), which was published in December 2007. He claimed to have made repeated attempts to contact the film's producers during the production phase, but they ignored him. He then announced his intention to sue Jolie. On 2 December 2011 he filed a lawsuit against Jolie, GK Films, FilmDistrict, Scout Film (production company based in Bosnia), and producer Edin Šarkić before the U.S. District Court in Chicago that has jurisdiction over Northern Illinois.
Asked to comment during an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Jolie dismissed Knežević's claims by saying: "It's par for the course. It happens on almost every film. There are many books and documentaries that I did pull from such as work by journalists Peter Maas and Tom Gjelten. It's a combination of many people's stories. But that particular book I've never seen".
Reception
Film writers expressed positive feelings after viewing a trailer for the film. Journalist Christiane Amanpour, who covered the war, introduced the film at the New York premiere, calling it “remarkable and courageous", while Wesley Clark, who was a military advisor during the conflict, called it "incredible." Writing in the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen praised the movie, seeing it as an indictment of the hesitant American reaction to the atrocities committed by Serbs against Muslims in Bosnia as well as an endorsement of American-led foreign interventionism such as the military action in Libya.
After the film was shown to locals in a special screening in Sarajevo, Murat Tahirović, the head of association of prisoners of war, stated that Jolie "really succeeded in telling the story of the whole war in her film and to show the most characteristic situations that detainees faced — mass executions, rapes, (being used as) human shields and all the other horrors." The head of an association of mothers of Srebrenica massacre victims Hatidza Mehmedović–who had earlier spoken out against Jolie after the media rumours regarding the film—said the final product was "really an excellent movie," "objective and sincere," and wanted to "thank Angelina for her intellectual and financial investment."
Critical reception
The film received mixed reviews. Based on 27 reviews collected by the film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 52% of critics gave In the Land of Blood and Honey a positive review, with an average rating of 5.7/10.
Screen International's Howard Feinstein commended Jolie for "attempting to rectify the gross injustices perpetrated against the Muslims that were tolerated in the name of a mythological Greater Serbia, masterminded by Slobodan Milošević", while reproaching her for "going beyond acceptable dramatic license and presenting the Serbs as caricatures". He furthermore has issues with her script "that often misses the boat" and its "over- and under-drawn characters".
Though feeling In the Land of Blood and Honey "has you dreading to learn what atrocity awaits around the next corner", The Hollywood Reporter's Todd McCarthy also thinks Jolie "deserves significant credit for creating a powerfully oppressive atmosphere and staging the ghastly events so credibly".
Variety's Justin Chang penned a negative review of the movie, labeling it a "dramatically misguided attempt to renew public awareness of the 1992-95 Balkan conflict" that "springs less from artistic conviction than from an over-earnest humanitarian impulse". He didn't like the way the movie "almost seems to sense its scenario tilting into tarted-up banality and abruptly shifts gears, to shockingly blunt effect" and criticized the actors for being a bit colorless, especially Marjanović and Kostić who "don't seem entirely at home with their characters' fairly risible dynamic".
Manohla Dargis of the New York Times has some issues with the way certain characters' dialogues are used as "short history lesson on the region that's clearly meant for the benefit of those watching the movie", but for the most part feels the movie "moves briskly and easily holds your attention, largely through a perverse love story that doesn't suffer for being such an obvious metaphor for the larger battle raging beyond Ajla and Danijel's relationship".
Associated Press writer Jake Coyle wrote a negative review in which he gives Jolie some credit for "using her celebrity to bring attention to the dangers of pacifism in the face of war crimes and ethnic cleansing", but criticizes her for "a heavy-handed touch" as well as for "putting politics ahead of story and character, thus blatantly imposing a message, which results in a movie whose narrative feels like a fictionalized United Nations presentation". He also has problems with the way the story is told — from "not enough context given to the overall conflict", over to "the love story that feels increasingly myopic as the war drags on and the film's ambitions broaden", and finally the way the film "makes its case only in the illustration of extreme, intolerable violence instead of finding a way to dramatize international inaction".
Joe Neumaier of the New York Daily News sees the biggest accomplishment of In the Land of Blood and Honey to be "the way it never loses sight of the closeness of the combatants, turning national intimacy into a tragic casualty". He goes on to commed the actors for "their commitment that helps us through a movie that is often harrowing, never less than intense but important, one unafraid of moments too many have chosen to forget".
Longtime Los Angeles Times resident critic Kenneth Turan feels Jolie's film has script problems: "Its core story is less compelling than its overall atmosphere. The Ajla/Danijel relationship is not always convincing, key plot points can feel contrived and the preponderance of Bosnian Serb bad guys comes off as schematic". He further points out Lu Chuan's film City of Life and Death as an example of "how far In the Land of Blood and Honey needs to travel".
The Village Voice's Karina Longworth's review is particularly negative, describing the film's outcome as being "in the range between predictable tragedy and ludicrous redemption". She dismisses the movie as "a United Nations extra-credit project about the Bosnian War" and criticizes Jolie for "producing a sanctimonious vanity commercial for her own good intentions".
Nathan Rabin of the A.V. Club refers to In the Land of Blood and Honey as "a film of shuddering earnestness and fevered good intentions gone awry, a dreary slog of a message movie with little but noble if unfulfilled aspirations to commend it". He continues by opining that "Serbian groups have justifiably complained about Jolie’s glib stereotyping of Serbs as racist heavies" before concluding that "Jolie has, after disastrously received 2003 message movie Beyond Borders, once again succeeded in attracting international attention to international atrocities and it's possible, if not particularly likely, that someday she will get around to dramatizing atrocities compellingly as well".
In December 2011 the Producers Guild of America announced that the film would be honored with its 2012 Stanley Kramer Award. The film was also nominated in the Best Foreign Language category for the 69th Golden Globe Awards. Some predictions also consider the film a potential Academy Award nominee.
Premise
The film is set in Sarajevo and surrounding areas before and during the Bosnian War. Danijel (Goran Kostić), a soldier fighting for the Bosnian Serbs, re-encounters Ajla (Zana Marjanović), a Bosniak woman he was involved with before the war, and who is now a captive in the camp he oversees. Their once promising connection has become ambiguous as their motives have been changed by the conflict.
Cast
Goran Kostić - Danijel
Zana Marjanović - Ajla
Rade Šerbedžija - Nebojša Vukojević
Vanessa Glodjo - Lejla
Nikola Đuričko - Darko
Branko Đurić - Aleksandar
Feđa Štukan - Petar
Alma Terzic - Hana
Jelena Jovanova - Esma
Ermin Bravo - Mehmet
Production
Jolie got the idea to write a script of a war-time love story after traveling to Bosnia and Herzegovina as a U.N. goodwill ambassador. After finishing the screenplay, she secured a production team and financing for the project that was being called "Untitled Bosnian Love Story." When it came down for the production team to chose a director, Jolie realized she herself wanted to direct. When casting calls and auditions were held, her name was deliberately withheld from all aspects of the project. When it was revealed to the cast that Angelina Jolie wrote the script, a number of them expressed pleasant surprise.
In July 2010 with the film already in pre-production, the producers approached the Serbian tycoon and media magnate Željko Mitrović over the usage of the sounds stages and studio sets owned by his Pink International Company's subsidiary Pink Films International in Šimanovci. However, he refused to do business with them, releasing a press statement: "I've held great affection and admiration for Angelina Jolie both as a person and as an artist, but unfortunately she's full of prejudice against the Serbs. I do not wish to be part of something that for the umpteenth time presents the Serbs as eternal bad guys".
The film was shot in Budapest and Esztergom during October and November 2010. The cast were entirely local actors from various parts of former Yugoslavia, many of whom lived through the war. Jolie said she spoke with the cast about their experiences during the war and tried to incorporate them into the film. The film was also shot in two versions – one in English, the other in the local language.
Jolie explained the reason she wrote and directed the film was to rekindle attention for the survivors of a war that took place in recent history. In an interview with Christiane Amanpour Jolie said she felt a responsibility to learn about the conflict in great detail, adding, "This was, you know, the worst genocide since World War II in Europe ... What were we all doing? And did we do enough? And why do we not speak about this enough?"
During the shooting of the film, it was falsely reported that the story was about a Bosnian woman falling in love with her Serbian rapist, prompting protests from the Bosnian Women Victims of War association and the revocation of the filming permit. Jolie denied the rumors and presented the script to Bosnia's ministry of culture, which then quickly reinstated the permit.
Plagiarism suit
In September 2011, Bosnian Croat author Josip Knežević aka James J. Braddock accused Jolie of plagiarizing his story Slamanje duše (The Soul Shattering), which was published in December 2007. He claimed to have made repeated attempts to contact the film's producers during the production phase, but they ignored him. He then announced his intention to sue Jolie. On 2 December 2011 he filed a lawsuit against Jolie, GK Films, FilmDistrict, Scout Film (production company based in Bosnia), and producer Edin Šarkić before the U.S. District Court in Chicago that has jurisdiction over Northern Illinois.
Asked to comment during an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Jolie dismissed Knežević's claims by saying: "It's par for the course. It happens on almost every film. There are many books and documentaries that I did pull from such as work by journalists Peter Maas and Tom Gjelten. It's a combination of many people's stories. But that particular book I've never seen".
Reception
Film writers expressed positive feelings after viewing a trailer for the film. Journalist Christiane Amanpour, who covered the war, introduced the film at the New York premiere, calling it “remarkable and courageous", while Wesley Clark, who was a military advisor during the conflict, called it "incredible." Writing in the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen praised the movie, seeing it as an indictment of the hesitant American reaction to the atrocities committed by Serbs against Muslims in Bosnia as well as an endorsement of American-led foreign interventionism such as the military action in Libya.
After the film was shown to locals in a special screening in Sarajevo, Murat Tahirović, the head of association of prisoners of war, stated that Jolie "really succeeded in telling the story of the whole war in her film and to show the most characteristic situations that detainees faced — mass executions, rapes, (being used as) human shields and all the other horrors." The head of an association of mothers of Srebrenica massacre victims Hatidza Mehmedović–who had earlier spoken out against Jolie after the media rumours regarding the film—said the final product was "really an excellent movie," "objective and sincere," and wanted to "thank Angelina for her intellectual and financial investment."
Critical reception
The film received mixed reviews. Based on 27 reviews collected by the film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 52% of critics gave In the Land of Blood and Honey a positive review, with an average rating of 5.7/10.
Screen International's Howard Feinstein commended Jolie for "attempting to rectify the gross injustices perpetrated against the Muslims that were tolerated in the name of a mythological Greater Serbia, masterminded by Slobodan Milošević", while reproaching her for "going beyond acceptable dramatic license and presenting the Serbs as caricatures". He furthermore has issues with her script "that often misses the boat" and its "over- and under-drawn characters".
Though feeling In the Land of Blood and Honey "has you dreading to learn what atrocity awaits around the next corner", The Hollywood Reporter's Todd McCarthy also thinks Jolie "deserves significant credit for creating a powerfully oppressive atmosphere and staging the ghastly events so credibly".
Variety's Justin Chang penned a negative review of the movie, labeling it a "dramatically misguided attempt to renew public awareness of the 1992-95 Balkan conflict" that "springs less from artistic conviction than from an over-earnest humanitarian impulse". He didn't like the way the movie "almost seems to sense its scenario tilting into tarted-up banality and abruptly shifts gears, to shockingly blunt effect" and criticized the actors for being a bit colorless, especially Marjanović and Kostić who "don't seem entirely at home with their characters' fairly risible dynamic".
Manohla Dargis of the New York Times has some issues with the way certain characters' dialogues are used as "short history lesson on the region that's clearly meant for the benefit of those watching the movie", but for the most part feels the movie "moves briskly and easily holds your attention, largely through a perverse love story that doesn't suffer for being such an obvious metaphor for the larger battle raging beyond Ajla and Danijel's relationship".
Associated Press writer Jake Coyle wrote a negative review in which he gives Jolie some credit for "using her celebrity to bring attention to the dangers of pacifism in the face of war crimes and ethnic cleansing", but criticizes her for "a heavy-handed touch" as well as for "putting politics ahead of story and character, thus blatantly imposing a message, which results in a movie whose narrative feels like a fictionalized United Nations presentation". He also has problems with the way the story is told — from "not enough context given to the overall conflict", over to "the love story that feels increasingly myopic as the war drags on and the film's ambitions broaden", and finally the way the film "makes its case only in the illustration of extreme, intolerable violence instead of finding a way to dramatize international inaction".
Joe Neumaier of the New York Daily News sees the biggest accomplishment of In the Land of Blood and Honey to be "the way it never loses sight of the closeness of the combatants, turning national intimacy into a tragic casualty". He goes on to commed the actors for "their commitment that helps us through a movie that is often harrowing, never less than intense but important, one unafraid of moments too many have chosen to forget".
Longtime Los Angeles Times resident critic Kenneth Turan feels Jolie's film has script problems: "Its core story is less compelling than its overall atmosphere. The Ajla/Danijel relationship is not always convincing, key plot points can feel contrived and the preponderance of Bosnian Serb bad guys comes off as schematic". He further points out Lu Chuan's film City of Life and Death as an example of "how far In the Land of Blood and Honey needs to travel".
The Village Voice's Karina Longworth's review is particularly negative, describing the film's outcome as being "in the range between predictable tragedy and ludicrous redemption". She dismisses the movie as "a United Nations extra-credit project about the Bosnian War" and criticizes Jolie for "producing a sanctimonious vanity commercial for her own good intentions".
Nathan Rabin of the A.V. Club refers to In the Land of Blood and Honey as "a film of shuddering earnestness and fevered good intentions gone awry, a dreary slog of a message movie with little but noble if unfulfilled aspirations to commend it". He continues by opining that "Serbian groups have justifiably complained about Jolie’s glib stereotyping of Serbs as racist heavies" before concluding that "Jolie has, after disastrously received 2003 message movie Beyond Borders, once again succeeded in attracting international attention to international atrocities and it's possible, if not particularly likely, that someday she will get around to dramatizing atrocities compellingly as well".
In December 2011 the Producers Guild of America announced that the film would be honored with its 2012 Stanley Kramer Award. The film was also nominated in the Best Foreign Language category for the 69th Golden Globe Awards. Some predictions also consider the film a potential Academy Award nominee.
Trailer
Poster
Official Site
Official Facebook
Official Twitter
In the Land of Blood and Honey @ IMDb.com
