Welcome to Sarajevo
A startling examination of the Bosnian war of the mid-1990s and the role of journalists in covering it, this film was based on real-life journalist Michael Nicholson's book Natasha's Story. Like Nicholson, cynical journalist Henderson (Stephen Dillane) is one of the rat pack of reporters looking for gore in the streets of besieged Sarajevo. He is outraged when grandstanding reporter Flynn (Woody Harrelson) helps local citizens remove the corpse of a mother gunned down on a family outing. But the next day, Henderson is among the journalist vultures at a grisly scene, and he has to tell a little girl that both her parents were killed. When his story is demoted by his television network in favor of a celebrity puff piece, Henderson is angry. At the behest of his producer, Jane Carson (Kerry Fox), he visits a local orphanage. Henderson becomes deeply involved with the plight of the children and starts documenting their individual stories even as his employers express increasing disinterest. Henderson campaigns to get the kids out of Yugoslavia, with the help of an American aid worker, Nina (Marisa Tomei). He promises a girl named Emira (Emira Nusevic) that he'll take her back to his home in England. To make good on his vow, he must risk both his career and his life. He adopts the child and she is happy in England. But he must return to war-torn Sarajevo when her birth mother, who had abandoned her, demands her daughter back. more..
Director: Michael Winterbottom
Starring: Stephen Dillane, Woody Harrelson, Marisa Tomei, Emira Nusevic, Kerry Fox
The power comes from Winterbottom's rigorous sense of storytelling, which manages to show and tell terrible tales without telegraphing emotionalism
What is so impressive about Welcome to Sarajevo is its cool restraint: Like the best of journalism, it never stoops to sensationalize or sermonize, but merely observes. It's about the facts rather than something called The Truth.
Bleak, darkly humorous and surprisingly unsentimental, Michael Winterbottom's film has the desperate air of a cri de coeur, and unlike many fiction films about war, its use of real-life footage seems in no way inappropriate or exploitative.
The result is startling and repellent -- a challenge to filmgoers accustomed to fake gunfire, fake wounds and cosmeticized death.
Shot in semidocumentary fashion, it builds to a more visceral climax than one initially expects.
Michael Winterbottom
Cannes Film Festival (1997)
Best Film
Chicago International Film Festival (1997)
National Board of Review (1997)
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