Welcome To Sarajevo

Michael Winterbottom's film which in terms of form and content recalls Oliver Stone's Salvador (1985), follows the lives of a group of Western journalists sent to report on the war in Bosnia. It is an interesting examination of human nature, religious intolerance and what we as a species are capable of inflicting on one another during times of war. Performances are good all round although Woody Harrelson is hardly stretched as the stereotypical brash, foolhardy American who will stop at nothing to get a story, despite constant sniper attacks and bombings. The stand-out performance is from Goran Visnjic (best known as Doctor Kovac on ER) as a local who is forced to become a freedom fighter. His transformation from a normal, kind and likable man into a desperate soldier willing to kill a fellow man for his cause is a frightening look at what a crisis can do to a man’s psyche.

The film-makers make every effort to recreate what it must have been like to be in the war torn city of the film's title in the mid-1990s. It uses actual footage taken from the war and blends it seamlessly with simulated war scenes, delivering a realism that is at times hard to watch. No punches are pulled in illustrating how the West, despite evidence of the atrocities with which they were presented, did next to nothing to help the Sarajevans. .

Welcome to Sarajevo puts the West in a light we may not feel comfortable with and it is an earnest, almost didactic, film but its authenticity and heart make it worth watching.

 

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