Sarajevo on film 1993 United States
Miss Sarajevo
The documentary that gave the siege its most famous image — a beauty pageant held under shellfire, and the U2 song named for it.
- Director
- Bill Carter
- Year
- 1993
- Language
- English
- Country
- United States
- Genre
- documentary
Miss Sarajevo is a documentary that is remembered for a single image: young women in evening gowns on a makeshift stage in besieged Sarajevo, holding a sign that read “Don’t let them kill us” and dancing to “I Will Always Love You” while a city under shellfire watched. Bill Carter, an American volunteer who spent the winter of 1993 working in the city, filmed the pageant and the life around it — the daily struggle, the water queues, the dark humour that kept people sane. It is the documentary of the siege at its most defiant and most surreal.
The film’s reach went far beyond the festival circuit. The band U2 saw Carter’s footage, and the image of the pageant contestants became the basis of their song “Miss Sarajevo”, released in 1995, which featured Luciano Pavarotti and lyrics that name the city directly. The song turned the pageant’s image into one of the most widely seen representations of the siege anywhere.
For a visitor, Miss Sarajevo is the shortest route into the siege’s strange, defiant texture — the mixture of terror and black comedy that the city’s wartime humour captured, and that the memorials necessarily cannot. It is a half-hour film that explains a lot about why Sarajevo, uniquely, went on holding beauty pageants and film festivals while the city burned.
Critical reception
The documentary was never indexed by the major review aggregators, so its formal critical record is thin — but it collected a string of awards, including the International Monitor Award, the Golden Hugo, and the Maverick Director Award at the Newport Beach Film Festival. Its producer’s own description is the one that has stuck.
Public reception and legacy
The documentary was broadcast internationally, and its most consequential effect was the song it produced: Bono insisted the film be titled Miss Sarajevo and wrote the U2 song of that name, which reached number 6 in the UK and featured Pavarotti. The song put the pageant’s image — winner Inela Nogić appears on the single cover — in front of the world, and U2 later became the first major Western act to play the city, at the 1997 PopMart concert. Carter was made an honorary citizen of Sarajevo in 2009.
What the critics said
“The film captures the dark humour of the besieged Sarajevans, their stubborn refusal to be demoralised”Read the review →
Portrait: John Hewson · CC BY 4.0