{"id":1652,"date":"2014-03-07T07:07:11","date_gmt":"2014-03-07T12:07:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=1652"},"modified":"2014-03-20T07:18:43","modified_gmt":"2014-03-20T11:18:43","slug":"in-the-land-of-blood-and-honey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=1652","title":{"rendered":"In the Land of Blood and Honey"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Angelina<\/a><\/p>\n

Possibly you didn\u2019t know Angelina Jolie has directed a movie, and, if so, probably you haven\u2019t seen it. I heard about her 2011 film about the Bosnian war, In the Land of Blood and Honey<\/i> (trailer<\/a>), in Serbia last fall. Due to Serbian objections to the film, it was actually shot in Hungary, with actors from the former Yugoslavia (starring Zana Marjanovi\u0107, Goran Kosti\u0107, and Rade \u0160erbed\u017eija). Jolie, whose humanitarian work is well known, says she was motivated to write the script after twice visiting Bosnia and Herzegovina as a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador and because this conflict was the worst European genocide since World War II. An estimated 100,000 people were killed, and 20,000 to 50,000 women were raped.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a love story between a Muslim woman and a Serbian military officer, with all the inter-ethnic and wartime complications you can readily imagine. But what\u2019s interesting is that, for the most part, the story is told from the point of view of women and what they endure during wartime and how they survive.<\/p>\n

The film received mixed reviews in the United States, Rotten Tomatoes rating: 56<\/a>, with many critics seeming to take issues with Jolie\u2019s humanitarian impulses themselves. However, Newsday<\/i>\u2019s critic Rafer Guzman said, \u201cIt\u2019s a tough, clear-eyed look at a ghastly ethnic war, with an admirably wide perspective that affords compassion for both sides,\u201d while Roger Ebert, who gave it a low ranking, acknowledged that \u201cThe film does what all war films must, which is to reduce the incomprehensible suffering of countless people into the ultimate triumph of a few.\u201d<\/p>\n

The film was highly controversial in Serbia, not surprisingly, and Jolie and some cast members received threats<\/a>. Serbs claimed it was propagandistic and reduced Serbs to caricatures of evil. I didn\u2019t see it entirely that way; there were sympathetic Serbs, including the main character. (And the Serbs did<\/i> carry out \u201cethnic cleansing,\u201d after all.) Interesting that it won an honorable mention in the Sarajevo Film Festival and a peace award at the Berlin film festival.<\/p>\n

My bottom line is that the film is pretty good, even if it does use some tired tropes, but the ultimate question\u2014what was the rest of the world doing while all this was going on?\u2014is still worth asking. Critics might dismiss the film, but no one should forget the tragedy \u00a0behind it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Possibly you didn\u2019t know Angelina Jolie has directed a movie, and, if so, probably you haven\u2019t seen it. I heard about her 2011 film about the Bosnian war, In the Land of Blood and Honey (trailer), in Serbia last fall. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"In the Land of Blood and Honey","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[56,57,104,32],"tags":[417,162,415,129],"class_list":["post-1652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-movies","category-the-morgue","category-thriller","tag-film","tag-movie","tag-thriller","tag-wars-and-conflicts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-qE","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1652"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1653,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1652\/revisions\/1653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}