Sarajevo on film 2012 Italy
Twice Born (Venuto al mondo)
An Italian film about a mother returning to Sarajevo to tell her son how he was conceived in the city's most desperate days.
- Director
- Sergio Castellitto
- Year
- 2012
- Language
- English
- Country
- Italy
- Genre
- drama, war
Twice Born (Venuto al mondo) is a maternal film about the siege of Sarajevo: a mother brings her teenage son to the city to tell him the story of his own origin — that he was conceived in Sarajevo during the war, by a man who was not his father. The film cuts between the present-day visit and the siege years, reconstructing the city under bombardment and the intense, dangerous love that took place inside it.
It is based on Margaret Mazzantini’s novel of the same name — Mazzantini is married to the director, Sergio Castellitto, who also stars — and was filmed partly on location in the city, with the scars of the siege still visible in the streets. Penélope Cruz plays the mother. It is, of the Sarajevo films, the one most explicitly about the human cost of the war as experienced by the city’s civilians and the children the war left behind.
For a visitor, it is the Italian-European perspective on the siege: the war seen through an outsider’s love for the city and its people, less documentary than melodrama, but filmed in the real streets and carrying the weight of the actual events. It pairs with the films of Aida Begić and Jasmila Žbanić as the foreign-made companion to the home-made accounts.
Critical reception
The film was broadly panned by critics — a 9% Tomatometer and a Metacritic score of 34 — with reviewers objecting to its use of the siege as a melodramatic backdrop. It earned no major awards.
Public reception and legacy
The film was a critical failure but a modest commercial one, grossing $9 million worldwide largely from European sales of the best-selling novel it adapted. Its IMDb audience rating of 7.3 sits far above its critics’ scores — the usual shape of a star-led melodrama, and a reminder that audience and critical verdicts on the war’s films do not always agree.
What the critics said
“this paternity mystery uses the Bosnian conflict as the manipulative backdrop to a preposterously overwrought and overlong melodrama.”Read the review →