Sarajevo on film 2011 United States
In the Land of Blood and Honey
Angelina Jolie's directing debut, filmed in Bosnia in Bosnian — a love story across a front line, told in the language of the war it depicts.
- Director
- Angelina Jolie
- Year
- 2011
- Runtime
- 127 minutes
- Language
- Bosnian
- Country
- United States
- Genre
- war, drama
In the Land of Blood and Honey was Angelina Jolie’s directorial debut, and it was made with a level of seriousness that surprised everyone who expected a celebrity vanity project. It tells of Ajla, a Bosniak woman, and Danijel, a Serb man who loved her before the war; when their paths cross again, he is an officer in the army besieging her city. The film follows them across the front line of the Bosnian war — a relationship that cannot exist inside a war that has divided them by ethnicity.
The notable detail is the production: Jolie filmed in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a largely local cast, in the Bosnian language, with Bosnian subtitles for its American release. It is the rare Hollywood production that treated the war’s language and setting as non-negotiable. The film was shot partly in and around the city, and its images of the siege — the bombardment, the marks left in the pavement — are drawn from the war’s actual record.
For a visitor, it is the most prominent international treatment of the war made in the language of the place — a reminder that the conflict’s most famous Hollywood account was filmed where it happened. Watch it alongside the siege museums and the memorials for the full picture.
Critical reception
Reviews divided sharply on Jolie’s debut. It earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Language Film but holds only a 57% Tomatometer and a Metacritic score of 56 — critics mostly agreed the craft was real even when the central love story was not.
Public reception and legacy
The production was protested in Bosnia even before release: rumours that it romanticised rape led the Bosnian Women Victims of War association to campaign against it and a filming permit to be briefly revoked, before Jolie showed the script to the culture ministry and filming resumed. After a special screening, the head of the Mothers of Srebrenica, who had protested, called the finished film “really an excellent movie”. It earned a Golden Globe nomination and the PGA Stanley Kramer Award, but audience scores were weak — 48% on Rotten Tomatoes — and the $14 million film grossed just over $1.2 million worldwide.
What the critics said
“The most impressive thing about In the Land of Blood and Honey is that Jolie makes you feel it.”Read the review →
“this alternately disturbing and titillating picture reps a dramatically misguided attempt to renew public awareness of the 1992-95 Balkan conflict”Read the review →
Portrait: Martin Kraft · CC BY-SA 4.0