Worth Seeing Again

Welcome to Sarajevo (1997) is a brilliantly effective feature film in the manner in which it intercuts location footage, newsreel and re-enactments of the Bosnian War.

Filming began shortly after the Siege of Sarajevo ended in 1996, creating a brutal realism in the location shots.  A sense of documentation permeates the film, which is based on Michael Nicholson's Natasha's Story. Michael Winterbottom directed from a script by Frank Cottrell Boyce.

It's an uneven movie to be sure, with several underdeveloped characters, most notably the star reporter Jimmy Flynn played by Woody Harrelson, who comes across as cartoonish and somewhat extraneous to the story.

Stephen Dillane's character, Henderson, and his relationship to a 9 year-old Bosniak girl named Emira, is the focus of the movie. The riveting scenes in which he works with an aid worker (Marisa Tomei) to evacuate a group of orphans from Sarajevo via a long bus ride to the Adriatic are heart-wrenching.

The UN and NATO classified the Bosnian War as the fourteenth most important concurrent humanitarian disaster in the world at the time of the war, a bureaucratic absurdity that the characters recognize throughout the movie.

The first movie made about the Bosnian War, Welcome to Sarajevo is definitely worth a second look.


TS