In the Land of Blood and Honey

In Sarajevo, 1992, Ajla Ekmečić is an ethnic Bosniak artist and lives with her sister who is a single mother of a baby boy. One evening, she meets her boyfriend, ethnic Serb police officer Danijel Vukojević, at a club. They enjoy the evening together, but many of the patrons are killed and Danijel is badly injured when the club is destroyed by artillery fire, signifying the opening salvo of the Bosnian War.

Some months later, Ajla and her sister Lejla prepare to flee the now besieged city, but their neighborhood is occupied by the Army of Republika Srpska before they can escape. The men are separated from the women, and then taken away to be executed, while Ajla and several other younger, more attractive women are taken away on buses to a Serb rape camp.

In the camp, the soldiers instruct the women on what life will be like and then ask the women what sort of duties they can perform. A doctor named Esma volunteers to perform medical services. Another woman says she can sew; rather than use her skills, an officer rapes her in front of the other women to demoralize them. Before another soldier can do the same to Ajla, the camp's commander takes her away, where it is revealed he is none other than Danijel.

The former couple struggle to grasp the magnitude of their predicament, especially given that inter-ethnic relationships are forbidden, and any evidence of such a relationship could compromise both Danijel and his father Nebojša, a General of the VRS Main Staff. Danijel tells Ajla that to shelter her from sexual abuse at the hands of the other soldiers, he has said that she is his "personal property." They begin an intense love affair, but Ajla is deeply disturbed by the horrors of the camp, and she subsequently makes numerous attempts to escape, all of which fail. The escape attempts greatly anger Danijel and compound his paranoia; he frequently lashes out at her.

Danijel's unit is involved in ethnic cleansing massacres directed by Nebojša, although these tactics do little to change the situation at the front line. A frustrated Nebojša learns of Ajla's existence and the special treatment she receives; he chastises his son for being affectionate towards "the enemy." Danijel remains coy, insisting he is doing his patriotic duty. Fearing the repercussions if their relationship is exposed, he allows Ajla to escape.

Ajla shelters herself in the forest outside the city, where she is found by Bosniak guerrilla forces, who take her back to their camp. In the camp, she happily reunites with Lejla, though this happiness is short-lived when Lejla informs her that her baby died some months earlier, sending her into inconsolable grief. Over a campfire, the guerrillas lament the paradoxical insanity of the war, one in particular pointing out that he feels he hates Serbs, yet his own mother is a Serb. Lejla blames Danijel, who has gained notoriety for his prominence in the siege amongst the anti-Serb forces. At this moment, Ajla informs the camp she was his prisoner, and the guerrillas concoct a plan for her to return to the camp and act as a mole.

Ajla returns to the camp claiming it's the safest place for her, leading a confused but grateful Danijel to rekindle their relationship. Shortly after her return, a soldier in the camp, Darko, is killed by an improvised explosive device, orphaning his infant child. Nebojša, learning of her return, immediately suspects her involvement. While Danijel is at the front line, Nebojša visits Ajla and orders her to paint a portrait of him. While she paints, he criticizes the "Muslim decadence" of such a career, which contrasts starkly with his own mother, a lifelong farm labourer widowed during World War II. Ajla counters that her grandfather was a Partisan, and that he taught her as a child that the constituent peoples of Yugoslavia are all equal irrespective of ethnicity. Nebojša smirks at her observation then leaves her alone with a soldier, Petar, who violently rapes her.

Danijel returns from the front line to find a distraught Ajla crying in the shower. Believing that she has cheated on him, he assaults her, but then sees his father's unfinished portrait and knows what has transpired. Danijel lures Petar to a hill above the city, then kills him. He then confronts his father, who attacks him and berates him for disgracing the family, saying "your mother would turn over in her grave if she knew you liked to fuck Muslim whores."

A sense of normalcy descends on Ajla and Danijel up until the events at Srebrenica. As NATO forces prepare to launch an offensive against the Serbs, Nebojša convenes a meeting with other commanders at a church. Danijel narrowly avoids being killed alongside his father when a massive explosion destroys the church (whether or not Ajla had a role in the attack is left ambiguous).

In conjunction with the bombing, ARBiH forces simultaneously launch a counter-offensive. Danijel hastily organizes his troops to halt their advance, but the Serb forces are decimated and most of his men are killed. Danijel returns to the now abandoned camp and finds Ajla patiently waiting. Believing she helped orchestrate the attack, he beats her, then shoots and kills her.

Danijel wanders through the wreckage of the city, which is now near liberation. Perhaps realizing what the war has driven him to become, and that it was all for nothing, he breaks down in tears on the street. UNPROFOR personnel arrest him shortly afterwards.

• Goran Kostić as Danijel Vukojević
• Zana Marjanović as Ajla Ekmečić
• Vanessa Glodjo as Lejla
• Rade Šerbedžija as Nebojša Vukojević
• Feđa Štukan as Petar
• Nikola Đuričko as Darko
• Branko Đurić as Aleksandar
• Jelena Jovanova as Esma
• Alma Terzić as Hana
• Ermin Bravo as Mehmet
• Boris Ler as Tarik
• Goran Jevtić as Mitar
• Miloš Timotijević as Durja
• Ermin Sijamija as Vuc
• Džana Pinjo as Nadja
• Dolya Gavanski as Maida

Jolie got the idea to write a script of a wartime love story after traveling to Bosnia and Herzegovina as a U.N. goodwill ambassador.[2] While writing the script she consulted with Richard Holbrooke, a U.S. diplomat and high-ranking Clinton Administration official who was one of the architects of the Dayton Agreement that put an end to the Bosnian War, General Wesley Clark, who was the director for strategic plans and policy on the United States Department of Defense's Joint Chiefs of Staff during the war, and Tom Gjelten, a foreign correspondent for NPR.[5] After finishing the screenplay, she secured a production team and financing for the project that was being called "Untitled Bosnian Love Story." When it came down for the production team to choose a director, Jolie realized she herself wanted to direct.[2] When casting calls and auditions were held, her name was deliberately withheld from all aspects of the project. When it was revealed to the cast that Angelina Jolie wrote the script, a number of them expressed pleasant surprise.[6][7]

In July 2010, with the film already in pre-production, the producers approached the Serbian tycoon and media magnate Željko Mitrović over the usage of the sound stages and studio sets owned by his Pink International Company's subsidiary Pink Films International in Šimanovci.[8] However, he refused to do business with them, releasing a press statement: "I've held great affection and admiration for Angelina Jolie both as a person and as an artist, but unfortunately she's full of prejudice against the Serbs. I do not wish to be part of something that for the umpteenth time presents the Serbs as eternal bad guys."[9][10]

Jolie and Brad Pitt on the set of In the Land of Blood and Honey in Esztergom on November 10, 2010

The film was shot in Budapest and Esztergom during October and November 2010.[11] The cast were entirely local actors from various parts of former Yugoslavia, many of whom lived through the war.[12] Jolie said she spoke with the cast about their experiences during the war and tried to incorporate them into the film.[13] The film was also shot in two versions – one in English, the other in Serbo-Croatian.[14]

Jolie explained the reason she wrote and directed the film was to rekindle attention for the survivors of a war that took place in recent history.[15] In an interview with Christiane Amanpour, Jolie said she felt a responsibility to learn about the conflict in great detail, adding, "This was, you know, the worst genocide since World War II in Europe ... What were we all doing? And did we do enough? And why do we not speak about this enough?"[16] Responding to claims that her film was not balanced, she stated that "The war was not balanced. I can't understand people who are looking for a balance that did not exist. There are some people who don't want to be reminded of these things, some even who deny that these things even happened. Those people are going to be angry."[17]

During production, it was falsely reported that the story was about a Bosnian woman falling in love with her Serbian rapist, prompting protests from the Bosnian Women Victims of War association and the revocation of the filming permit.[18] Jolie denied the rumors and presented the script to Bosnia's ministry of culture, which then quickly reinstated the permit.[19]

Jolie speaks to the Voice of America about the film at the Sarajevo Film Festival.

Critics expressed mixed feelings after viewing a trailer for the film.[27][28] Christiane Amanpour, a journalist who covered the Bosnian War for CNN, introduced the film at its New York premiere on December 5, 2011, calling it "remarkable and courageous".[29] The premiere after-party was held on The Standard hotel's rooftop and was co-sponsored by the US foreign policy think tank Council on Foreign Relations (of which Jolie has been a member since July 2007[30]) and Women for Women International, a women's rights organization.[29] The film's script consultant, General Wesley Clark, was also at the premiere, calling the film "incredible."[31]

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen praised the film, seeing it as an indictment of the hesitant American reaction to the atrocities Serbs committed against Bosniaks in Bosnia as well as an endorsement of American interventionism such as the 2011 Libyan civil war.[32]

After the film was shown to non-Serb victims in a special screening in Sarajevo, Murat Tahirović, the head of association of prisoners of war, said that Jolie "really succeeded in telling the story of the whole war in her film and to show the most characteristic situations that detainees faced—mass executions, rapes, [being used as] human shields and all the other horrors." The head of an association of mothers of Srebrenica massacre victims, Hatidža Mehmedović, who had earlier spoken out against Jolie after the media rumours regarding the film, said the final product was "really an excellent movie," "objective and sincere," and wanted to "thank Angelina for her intellectual and financial investment."[33][34]

Talking about the film during an appearance on Croatian talk show Nedjeljom u 2, Srđan Dragojević, a Serbian film director, said: "It's a very bad movie. I find it interesting that someone spent $12-13 million for something that in the end looks like those Croatian or Bosniak patriotic propaganda films from the 1990s. In the Land of Blood and Honey has the historical authenticity of 'Allo 'Allo!. It's completely senseless, badly directed, badly written, and deserves absolutely no attention at all, but for the fact it's got the name of a global film star attached to it. And having worked in Hollywood and interacted with some of its movie stars, I think I know how this film got made. Being a big star does not always work to your advantage. These people live their sheltered and insular Beverly Hills lives and have very little clue about what's going on 15 miles away in The Valley, let alone half a world away in Bosnia. This film is a very strange attempt at tackling something you're absolutely clueless about; it would be like me writing a story about American suburbia using news reports as the basis. It seems like nobody had enough courage to tell Angelina that during the making of the film".[35][36]

In the Serbian media, the film received more negative reviews, arguing that it ignored Serbian war victims and unfairly presented Serbs as evildoers.[37] Serbian filmmaker and two-time Palme d'Or winner Emir Kusturica called it a "propaganda film."[38]

• Official website
• In the Land of Blood and Honey at IMDb
• In the Land of Blood and Honey at Box Office Mojo
• In the Land of Blood and Honey at Rotten Tomatoes
• In the Land of Blood and Honey at Metacritic