Angelina Jolie, Bosnia at heart
'In the land of blood and honey' places that blind spot in the history of the twentieth century, at that moment of absolute pain, at the same time as of indignity and shame for the nations that allowed it to do: the war in Bosnia
When Angelina Jolie asked me to meet her, last Thursday, in Paris, to present the preview of her In the land of blood and honey, of course, I started by saying that I wanted to see the film, but, after seeing it, I did not I doubted it for a second.
Because what a story!
We are before a great Hollywood actress.
We are facing one of the most sought-after and celebrated stars in world cinema.
We are facing a great name that no one doubted that, if one day he decided to go to the other side of the camera, he would have themes, funding and scripts to choose from, as well as actors who would fight for the privilege of joining the adventure.
Behold, Angelina Jolie, in effect, passes behind the camera and what happens?
He shoots an auteur film, with unknown Bosnian actors, in a language, Bosnian, which, both in America and in Europe, seems quite improbable, and places his film in that blind spot in the history of the 20th century, at that time of absolute pain, at the same time as of indignity and shame for the nations that they allowed to do: the Bosnian war.
The result is a movie that sounds incredibly believable to begin with. I saw, in real life, men and women who looked like brothers and sisters to Danijel and Ajla, the Romeo and Juliet in this love story with a horror and concentration camp background. And this matter of the rape conceived as a weapon of war, the humiliation of a people through the tortured bodies of their women and the ethnic purification through the womb that constitute, not the set, but the theme of the film, I already I had filmed them in Bosnia (my 1994 documentary). Well, the fictional work that she has based on these dramas, their reconstruction, almost twenty years later, in some studios in Hungary, her passage to writing, realization and legend are of a bloody veracity and capture the exaltation and the atrocious violence that marked the reality and of which, unfortunately, I can attest.
The result is a rare and highly emotional case of successful transmission. Angelina Jolie was a teenager at the time of the events that she narrates. Surely, she only heard of them belatedly and by hearsay. At the time when a handful of intellectuals (in Germany, Peter Schneider and Hans Christoph Buch; in England, Salman Rushdie; in the United States, Christopher Hitchens or Susan Sontag; in France, the author of these lines, among others) That Sarajevo was announcing the end of a Europe that had just offered the 21st century its new and no less horrifying war in Spain, she kept dreaming of her roles in Cyborg 2 and Hackers. She now, she takes over, the torch, somehow continues the combat and, not content with reliving what we live, she performs the miracle, always overwhelming when it occurs, of turning our memory into history.
And the result is, finally, a political act of those that the cinema engenders less and less. A compromised movie? Partial? A film that is not afraid to fight or risk, when necessary, being branded a Manichean by cretins? Yes, of course. Because it is a film that calls bread, bread and wine, wine. Because it is a film that, far from the sheepish unanimity that we might have feared from a pure and tough creature of the Hollywood industry, calls the Serbian militiamen of the time “fascists” and is careful to distinguish, in the confusion of those dark times, victims and executioners. And, to use Godard's words, it is not just a movie, but a fair movie, doing justice to the dead and paying tribute to the survivors.
During its screening in Sarajevo, on the eve of its presentation in Paris, In the Land of Blood and Honey was welcomed by a crowd that hesitated for several minutes amid tears and cheers. Normal. Those raped women who had been silent for twenty years, the children of those rapes who, on the verge of reaching adulthood, lived their genealogy as a disgrace, that Bosnian society that had its most painful secret in such events ... soon a great actress, who is also a great lady, puts her prestige at their service and, for the first time, allows them to raise their heads a little again.
I knew a similar situation, forty years ago, in Bangladesh, when a Muslim head of state, President Mujibur Rahman, made the courageous decision to name “birangona”, literally “national heroines”, to the tens of thousands of young people raped by the Pakistani soldiers, who had been marginalized from society as well as, often, from their own families. It is, mutatis mutandis, the gesture of Angelina Jolie. And in him lies the grim grandeur of her film.
Our paths crossed for the first time around the figure of Daniel Pearl, whose widow she played in a film.
Then a second time, on February 25, 2007, in Bahai, in the north of Sudan, where I was waiting for the possibility of entering Darfur clandestinely and where I went to visit the refugee camps.
This third encounter is the good one, since it occurs at the crossroads of an indefeasible suffering and its inscription in the register of a work of art.
