Sarajevo on film 1997 Spain
Comanche Territory (Territorio Comanche)
Arturo Pérez-Reverte's film of his own time as a correspondent in besieged Sarajevo — a novelist's war, filmed from the front line of the siege.
- Director
- Gerardo Herrero
- Year
- 1997
- Language
- Spanish
- Country
- Spain
- Genre
- war, drama
Comanche Territory (Territorio Comanche) is the siege of Sarajevo as seen by the war correspondents who lived through its early days — and the man who wrote it was one of them. Arturo Pérez-Reverte, the Spanish novelist, covered the war in the city as a reporter, and turned his experience into a novel of the same name; the film, directed by Gerardo Herrero, is that novel adapted, with the correspondents of the title occupying the besieged city and trying to do their work in a place where doing your work could get you killed.
The title is the correspondents’ own slang for the streets under fire — the “comanche territory” of a city where snipers and shells made every crossing a calculation. It is a film about the siege’s strange professional class: the journalists who covered it, the risks they took, and the ordinary Sarajevans whose war they were covering.
For a visitor, it is the correspondent’s-eye companion to the siege: the same front lines, seen from the press’s side of the wire, by a writer who was there. It pairs with Welcome to Sarajevo as the two versions of the siege as the outside world first saw it.
Critical reception
The film played in competition at the 1997 Berlin Film Festival, where Variety reviewed it as a striking recreation of wartime Sarajevo from the correspondents’ point of view. Rotten Tomatoes aggregates no critic reviews, so no consensus score exists.
Public reception and legacy
The film sold almost 197,000 admissions in Europe, overwhelmingly in Spain, where it remains a rare mainstream treatment of the siege, and it was nominated for a Goya Award. Its source, Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s novel of his own time in Sarajevo, stands as one of the principal Spanish accounts of the war.
What the critics said
“Despite its flaws, 'Comanche Territory' succeeds in providing a striking outsider's view of an insane and tragic conflict.”Read the review →