BERLIN, Feb 19 (Reuters) – Getting down to inform the story of Sarajevo’s four-year siege within the Nineteen Nineties, Nenad Sicin-Sain thought he was documenting Europe’s final huge warfare – just for Russia to invade Ukraine throughout filming, heightening the feelings of an already fraught venture.
“Kiss the Future”, which premiered on the Berlin Movie Competition on Sunday, tells the story of the Bosnian capital’s encirclement by the eyes of the artists and musicians who saved performing all through, putting up an unlikely bond with Irish rock band U2.
“We began making a movie on the final warfare in Europe after which a brand new warfare broke out,” Sicin-Sain instructed reporters. “The story stayed the identical however the feelings grew to become extra visceral.”
Dwelling to Muslim Bosniaks, Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats, Sarajevo was essentially the most various of Yugoslavia’s cities, and suffered essentially the most when the nation broke up, positioned below siege by ethnic Serbs making an attempt to carve out as giant a slice of the nation as doable.
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Via interviews with artists, assist staff and U2 lead singer Bono, the movie remembers the town’s isolation, till artists hit on the thought of bringing the town’s plight to world consideration through telecasts into U2’s stadium live shows.
It was the artists’ resilience that attracted producers Matt Damon and Ben Affleck to the venture.
“It is concerning the resilience of all of us and that is an exquisite factor to place out into the world, notably now,” Damon instructed Reuters. His manufacturing firm is within the early levels of researching a movie concerning the warfare in Ukraine, he added.
Footage of Bosnian Serb common Ratko Mladic – now serving a life sentence for genocide – denying warfare crimes makes the parallels with immediately’s warfare inescapable.
“All the pieces that occurred 30 years in the past is so strongly and deeply related to occasions which might be taking place immediately,” mentioned Vesna Zaimovic, a Sarajevan who helped make the documentary.
Scenes of Sarajevans performing punk rock in cellars as rockets rain down above recall to mind Kyiv’s flourishing theatre scene, and the parallel is made specific within the last frames when footage from final yr of Russian President Vladimir Putin addressing a warfare rally is proven.
The movie presents U2’s 1997 post-siege live performance in Sarajevo, the place Bono urged the town to look with hope to the post-war and “kiss the longer term” as a second of catharsis, however it additionally serves as a reminder of how lengthy restoration can take.
To at the present time, the town has but to host a bigger live performance.
Reporting by Thomas Escritt; Further reporting by Hanna Rantala; Modifying by David Holmes
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