Name: Retro Film Review: Welcome to Sarajevo (1997)
Item: Welcome to Sarajevo
Rating: 40
Author: @drax

(source:tmdb.org)

The author of this review has few opportunities to watch his home town in feature films. For a whole variety of reasons – economic, political, parochial, snobbish, cultural etc. - the Croatian film industry used to avoid Split as a film location. It is even rarer to see Split being featured in non-Croatian films. That thing happened during a few seconds of Welcome to Sarajevo, a 1997 British drama directed by Michael Winterbottom.

The script, inspired by the autobiographical book by Michael Nicholson, takes place in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo during the first year of the Bosnian War. Michael Henderson (played by Stephen Dillane) is one of many reporters who came to cover the conflict from the besieged city, and he has plenty of things to report, few of them pleasant – Serb artillery is turning the city into rubble while Serb snipers are taking out helpless civilians. Henderson is an experienced and dedicated professional, but he is getting increasingly disgusted with the way the world reacts to his reporting - media companies quickly get tired of the non-stop slaughter while Western governments find all possible excuses for not intervening and stopping the genocide. He is especially irked by the plight of children and, after a while, he decides to use a humanitarian convoy led by American activist Nina (played by Marisa Tomei) to smuggle an 11-year-old girl, Emira (played by Emira Nušević), to Britain and adopt her.

Despite creating high ratings for television news programmes and making many journalists famous, the war in Bosnia (and the former Yugoslav wars in general) wasn't a particularly appealing theme for Hollywood. It is relatively easy to explain why – the conflict was too depressing and too complicated for the average American viewer and, despite the US military intervention at the end, it didn't make the American government look particularly good. British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom didn't have any qualms about showing a conflict that would hardly be the British government's finest moment. Welcome to Sarajevo is very explicit in its criticism of British (and Western) inaction and does nothing to spare the audience of such a policy's horrible consequences. Using a combination of documentary footage, live action and painstaking reconstruction of the most gruesome incidents of the Sarajevo siege, Winterbottom creates a powerful impact. The film was shot in Sarajevo only two years after the end of the war, and the ruined buildings give it additional authenticity. Unfortunately, that authenticity is compromised by the staged scenes that show Muslims being massacred on the territories under Serb control - something, which, unlike the Sarajevo horrors, wasn't recorded on camera, for obvious reasons. Winterbottom has already proved his point about the genocidal nature of the war with the documentary and quasi-documentary footage.

Another, much bigger flaw of the film is in the way it reduces the whole complicated tragedy of Bosnia to the plight of children in the besieged city. All that makes good headlines, it could arouse Western humanitarian instincts like nothing else, but it could do very little to stop the war in the first place. The film leads us to believe that simply taking away children to a safer place would reduce the suffering – it doesn't deal with the children's parents nor with the disturbing possibility that the children would experience their parents' war traumas or repeat their mistakes once they grow up. Another problem with the film is the rather carefree attitude towards events that preceded the war in Bosnia - the film has its prologue set in the Croatian border city of Vukovar, the site of a three-month long siege and thousands of innocent civilians killed; it suggests that survivors from that hell tried to seek shelter in Bosnia, which definitely wasn't the case. The artificiality of the prologue is matched by the almost unbearable pathos and "symbolism" of the ending (Bosnian musicians defy the Serbs by having a concert in the open). The general impression of Welcome to Sarajevo is even worse when we compare it with some recent films that actual Bosnians made about those events (No Man's Land and Fuse).

On the other hand, Winterbottom has managed to collect a good cast. The relatively unknown Stephen Dillane is very good as the protagonist, while Woody Harrelson agrees to be second fiddle in the nevertheless noticeable role of his flamboyant American colleague. The best revelation of the film is Goran Višnjić, a Croatian actor who would later become famous as Dr. Luka Kovač in ER. His character of Henderson's driver Risto, a former intellectual forced to renounce his pre-war pacifism, is very convincing and very realistic.

Welcome to Sarajevo is a well-intentioned failure, but it shouldn't be judged too harshly. Of its many flaws, the biggest one is not being made five or six years earlier, when its impact could have prevented some tragic mistakes instead of reminding the world of them.

RATING: 4/10 (+)

(Note: The text in its original form was posted in Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.films.reviews on January 8th 2004)