Jolie shows directorial debut at Berlin Fest

BERLIN:

Angelina Jolie says it was only natural that her directorial debut should tackle some of the toughest issues facing humanity and after wartime Bosnia, Afghanistan is likely to be her next subject.

At the Berlin film festival to present her film In the Land of Blood and Honey, the Hollywood icon-cum-humanitarian said her turn behind the camera was aimed at using cinema as a force for reconciliation. “I’ve written a lot of journals while travelling over 10 years in the conflicts around the world and being frustrated by the lack of intervention,” said the 36-year-old Oscar-winning actor. “So I went to the region and started to really look at the Bosnian war, but I couldn’t really understand or figure it out. So I gave myself some education.”

The film tells the story of a young Muslim woman and the policeman son of a Bosnian Serb general who had a fling before the conflict broke out. When they meet again, she has been taken prisoner by a unit of the Bosnian Serb army commanded by her former lover. As the women around her are gang raped, the officer offers her protection, telling the other soldiers she is his “property”. But the upheaval of the relentless war means he is only able to shield her for so long.

Jolie said the most difficult part of filming was asking her actors, almost all of whom come from the former Yugoslavia and had their own bitter memories of the war, to simulate the savagery that tore their country apart. “It was very hard for everybody, for the actors, the men who had to be the aggressors,” said Jolie, who is in the German capital with Pitt and their six children. “They were fathers, husbands and very sweet men and they didn’t want to do that. But they also knew that they had to do it on behalf of the women just to show the brutality they suffered.”

When asked what lies ahead, Jolie said she would keep her focus on the world’s trouble spots. “I have been working on something that deals with Afghanistan but I haven’t shown it yet to anybody,” she said.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 12^th, 2012.