Written by During the Bosnian War, Danijel, a soldier fighting for the Serbs, re-encounters Ajla, a Bosnian who’s now a captive in his camp he oversees. Their once promising connection has become ambiguous as their motives have changed.
Angelina Jolie could hardly have chosen a more difficult directorial debut than In the Land of Blood and Honey. Jolie’s self-penned film, which is set against the backdrop of the Bosnian war, caused outrage when the media reported that the plot revolved around a Bosnian rape victim falling in love with her Serbian attacker.
The Bosnian government briefly suspended Jolie’s right to film in the country, while Bosnia’s Association of Women Victims of War wrote to the United Nations calling for Jolie to lose her UN goodwill ambassador status.
According to the synopsis, the movie is a wartime love story between a Serb guard in a prison camp and his former girlfriend, a Bosnian Muslim detainee and does not contain any rape scenes. Jolie said that she was the victim of “unfair pressure based on wrong information” and eventually had her filming permissions restored.
Given the controversy, the film might have been released under the radar. Instead, the promotional campaign is churning into gear, starting with the release of the trailer. The film, which is shot in both English and Serbo-Croat, will be released in the US on 23 December.
I have to give props to whoever designed the poster. It avoids the “giant floating heads” or “cast lined up” tropes Hollywood loves oh-so-much, and uses a fairly simple design to convey a lot. The nice thing is, it works whether you notice the faces in the blood or not. The second shot shows star Zana Marjanovic, who plays Alja, one of the film’s two leads. The last shot is, of course, Angelina in full director mode.
In the Land of Blood and Honey tells the story of a Serbian soldier named Danijel who falls in love with a Bosnian Muslim woman named Alja under the worst possible circumstances — in the midst of war between their two factions and with her as his prisoner. With a planned December 23rd release date, it’s still arriving in time for Oscar consideration, assuming Jolie proves to have any writing/directing chops. With a story of forbidden love set against a war-torn backdrop, it certainly has the faint whiff of Oscar bait about it.
Set against the backdrop of the Bosnian War that tore the Balkan region apart in the 1990s, “In the Land of Blood and Honey” tells the story of Danijel (Goran Kostić) and Ajla (Zana Marjanović), two people from different sides of a brutal ethnic conflict. Danijel, a soldier fighting for the Serbs, and Ajla, a Bosnian held captive in the camp he oversees, knew each other before the war, and could have found love with each other. But as the armed conflict takes hold of their lives, their relationship grows darker, their motives and connection to one another ambiguous, their allegiances uncertain.
“In the Land of Blood and Honey” portrays the incredible emotional, moral and physical toll that the war exerts both on individuals and people as a whole, and the terrible consequences that stem from the lack of political will to intervene in a society stricken with conflict.
