In the Land of Blood and Honey
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Love in times of war |
| Original title | In the Land of Blood and Honey |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language |
English , Bosnian , Croatian , Serbian |
| Publishing year | 2011 |
| length | 127 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Angelina Jolie |
| script | Angelina Jolie |
| production |
Graham King , Angelina Jolie, Tim Headington , Tim Moore |
| music | Gabriel Yared |
| camera | Dean Semler |
| cut | Patricia Rommel |
| occupation | |
| |
In the Land of Blood and Honey (alternatively love in times of war ) is an American feature film from 2011 and also the debut of actress Angelina Jolie as a director and screenwriter .
The film had its world premiere on December 5, 2011 at the School of Visual Arts in New York City . The European premiere followed on February 12, 2012 at the International Film Festival in Berlin , but outside of the competition. The film was presented on February 14, 2012 in Sarajevo , where the action took place.
action
In the early 1990s, the Serbian policeman Danijel and the Bosnian-Muslim artist Ajla meet in a dance hall. They are attracted to each other, dance and laugh together. But the fun evening comes to an abrupt end when a bomb explodes among the dancing people. Danijel and Ajla remain unharmed, but when civil war breaks out across Yugoslavia, they are separated from each other. Danijel was drafted into the army of the Bosnian Serbs , where he served under the orders of his father, the Islamophobic general Nebojša Vukojević. A few months later, Ajla is abducted by Serbian civil war militias from the apartment that she shares with her sister Lejla and her child and taken to an internment camp, where rape and torture of Bosnian women are the order of the day. She meets Danijel again among the prison guards. He tries to earn his father's respect, but at the same time tries to protect Ajla from the other soldiers by locking her in a single room and giving her the task of drawing portraits of his comrades. Although there is still a great attraction between the two of them, the situation becomes a stress test for their relationship as their motivations have changed and calculation, suspicion and fear come between them.
background
Behind the film's title is a play on words, namely the Turkish word for honey ( bal ) and the Turkish word for blood ( kan ), i.e. Balkans .
Croatian journalist James Braddock accused Jolie of copying from his book The Soul Shattering (2007) while writing the script and filed a lawsuit. Jolie denied the plagiarism allegation . She has been influenced by many books and documentaries, but Braddock's work is not one of them because she does not know it.
Initially, Jolie planned to shoot the film in the studios of Pink Films International in Belgrade - in Serbia. After negotiations with the owner Željko Mitrović failed in the first half of 2010, she moved to Bosnia and Herzegovina .
Filming began in October 2010. After parts of the film's story were leaked, the Bosnian Association of Women Victims of War protested against the filming; the Ministry of Culture of the Muslim-Croatian Federation withdrew Jolie's filming permit for Sarajevo. The film was therefore shot mostly in Budapest and Esztergom (both in Hungary).
The film is exclusively cast with actors who come from the former Yugoslavia and some of whom experienced the Bosnian War themselves. In addition to the English version, a version in the actors' native languages was also shot.
Reviews
“After all, it doesn't matter that this film is very similar to a mediocre academy's graduation film, in the way it is made, which seems to have sprung from a recipe book at every moment. It doesn't matter that a very one-sided depiction of the events was chosen as the thread of the film - how else should genocide be re-enacted on film? After all, it doesn't matter that the film is oversaturated with moments borrowed from Holocaust films by Pakula, Spielberg or Polanski without serving any purpose other than serving the dramaturgy. Does this film even want to be a film, or just a political act, a statement? […] It is more important to note that Jolie definitely knows what she's doing. That she puts up pictures in order to dismantle them. [...] Yes, Jolie believes in the power of images and knows how to instrumentalize them. But, here too, it would be paradoxical if it were not so, as it is itself primarily a media image. Unfortunately, she also believes that her film could be a melodrama. But he cannot, because he forbids himself to do so. "
“ Hollywood star Angelina Jolie made an impressive debut as a director with the anti-war film In the Land of Blood and Honey . [...] Your film captivates as a moving study of how war and violence throw personalities off track and destroy all humanity. The story […] has many strong moments. In addition to her sense of clever scenic arrangements, Jolie shows sensitivity as an actor. Zana Marjanovic in the role of Ajla and Goran Kostic as Danijel succeed in multifaceted character studies under her guidance. However, the film is not always convincing. Because some developments seem implausible, some actions of the protagonists are incomprehensible. These inaccuracies hit the figure of Ajla in particular: It has not been clearly established whether her behavior is shaped solely by her personal struggle for bare survival. It often appears that it is acting on behalf of partisans who are hiding out of hiding and fighting with armed force and assassinations against the so-called ethnic cleansing, the murder of tens of thousands. [...] On the positive side, Jolie avoids any hint of kitsch. She deliberately refrained from the participation of actors and shot the film in English and Serbo-Croatian. That is why their request to accuse the horror of all wars and all forms of violence by people against people seems credible. "
“You can't say that Jolie doesn't take her directorial debut seriously. In the Land of Blood and Honey turns out to be a very serious attempt to translate their humanistic position into the language of the film. The director is pursuing a two-pronged approach. On the one hand she shows the horrors and senselessness of war, on the other hand she makes a vehement plea for humanity that she tries to embody with the torn figure of Danjiel. But it stays that way. The film does not go beyond a well-intentioned and exhausted attempt. Such a balance that Jolie is striving for here, namely, despite all the horror of seeing the differentiated person behind the monster - Jolie's protagonist is not depicted differentiated enough for that. As the only motivation for his participation in the atrocities, she provides him with a fascist-mad father and portrays him as a sensitive character who cannot defend himself. The whole thing is, however, a very thin basis for justification and by no means triggers the range of feelings that Ralph Fienne's infamous character of concentration camp commandant Amon Göth in Schindler's list did. In general, at some point the film gets lost in the highly stylized images and the massive and often shown acts of violence against which the relatively thin story does not match. The atrocities with which Jolie, at least it seems, wants to address an urgent plea for human rights to the audience, have, in contrast to other war films, a strong focus on the suffering of women who are victims simply because of their gender. even before they are erased for their origins or beliefs. Whether your message reaches all viewers, however, clearly depends on the individual and on how much and how long they can do these brutal images to themselves. You definitely shouldn't be squeamish when visiting In the Land of Blood and Honey . "
“Credit to Angelina Jolie, who also wrote the script, for avoiding kitsch as much as possible and showing the relationship between the two in all its hopelessness and brutality. The portrayal of the war is also not lacking in drasticness. Massive, but concentrated, she stages the atrocities of war. […] Sometimes, however, it goes too far. Then the impression arises that she is a little too dutifully adding acts of violence to acts of violence. And when she lets her characters talk about the facts of the war, the film acts like an instructive history lesson. Nevertheless, the bottom line is an astonishingly concentrated film, which is surprisingly unpretentious for a directorial debut by a Hollywood star. "
“There is so much wrong with In The Land Of Blood and Honey ! The atrocities - from mass rape to human shields to babies being thrown from balconies - are so drastic that the film only stops short of war pornography. [...] In addition, there are technical weaknesses: the secondary characters appear and disappear, as fits the plot of the emotional manipulation and the two main characters only simulate a development in their relationship to one another. [...] Angelina Jolie may be given high credit for not putting on a vanity show for her directorial debut and trying to make a cruel, depressing war film, but in the end the same applies to Miss Jolie: well thought is not well done. "
“In the Land of Blood and Honey leaves nothing out in its portrayal of war . The film shows executions, massacres and mass graves with bulldozers driving over their piles of corpses. The internment camps appear as revived concentration camps. Angelina Jolie also shows that this is a war between men and women. It doesn't show how violence arises. But very drastic where it leads in the relationship between the sexes. [...] Just to let everything come out vividly, [the film] makes a lot of things very clear. In the fine arts one knows the term of the " pathos formula ". In a more literal sense than he has there, the word fits here too. So that the viewer is touched, everything is drawn very strongly. Nothing is left out. Pathetic formulas are used to make sure that everyone understands everything. [...] Recognizable an actress' film. Gestures, language, facial expressions are all in the service of "strong" images that serve to accuse and ultimately to accuse oneself. To identify the perpetrators and victims of the war as individuals is really not a little. "
Awards
- 2011: Received the Heart of Sarajevo Award at the Sarajevo Film Festival
- 2012: Honored with the Stanley Kramer Award at the Producers Guild of America Awards
- 2012: Nomination in the category for Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globe Awards 2012
- 2012: Award in the category of best foreign film at the NAACP Image Awards
- 2012: Nomination in the category Best Film Director at the NAACP Image Awards
Web links
- Official international website for the film (English)
- In the Land of Blood and Honey at the Internet Movie Database (English)
- In the Land of Blood and Honey in the online movie database
- In the Land of Blood and Honey at Rotten Tomatoes (English)
- In the Land of Blood and Honey at Metacritic (English)
- Box Office Mojo grossing results from In the Land of Blood and Honey
- Angelina Jolie and Vanessa Glodjo in the live video chat about the film on January 12, 2012 on YouTube , accessed on February 15, 2012. (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.kino-zeit.de/filme/in-the-land-of-blood-and-honey
- ↑ Plagiarism allegation against Angelina Jolie Stern.de, accessed on February 15, 2012.
- ↑ Angelina Jolie Copyright Lawsuit Won't Affect Release of Her New Film The Hollywood Reporter, accessed February 15, 2012. (English)
- ↑ Angelina has prejudices against Serbs, which is why Željko does not want to take part in her project. www.dnevnik.hr
- ↑ Angelina Jolie's directorial debut met with protests in Bosnia Los Angeles Times, accessed February 15, 2012. (English)
- ^ Filming Locations IMDb.com, accessed February 15, 2012.
- ↑ In the Land of Blood and Honey ( Memento of the original from February 15, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. negative-film.de, accessed on February 25, 2012
- ↑ Angelina Jolie Filmkritik's disturbing directorial debut on Focus Online, accessed on October 28, 2012
- ↑ The enemy in bed kino-zeit.de, accessed on October 28, 2012
- ↑ Angelina Jolie's 'In the Land of Blood and Honey': Surprisingly unpretentious ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as broken. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. rbb-online.de, accessed on February 15, 2012
- ^ Film review blogs.taz.de, accessed on February 15, 2012
- ^ War and other forces of nature Spiegel Online, accessed on February 15, 2012
