Welcome to Sarajevo
Director: | Michael Winterbottom |
Writer: | Frank Cottrell Boyce |
Director of Photography: | Daf Hobson |
Editor: | Trevor Waite |
Music: | Adrian Johnston |
Production Designer: | Mark Geraghty |
Producers: | Graham Broadbent and Damian Jones |
Miramax; R; 100 minutes | |
Release: | 11/97 |
Cast: | Stephen Dillane, Woody Harrelson, Marisa Tomei, Emira Nusevic, Kerry Fox, Goran Visnjic and Emily Lloyd |
Based on the memoir Natasha's Story by Michael Nicholson |
One of the best films of the year, Welcome to Sarajevo is likely to be ignored by mainstream audiences. Regrettably, few will be interested in a film about the war in Bosnia that graphically depicts the war-ravaged region and its victims, including scores of dead children. With a documentary-like style, Winterbottom shows, not tells, the horror of war from the inside, through the eyes (and cameras) of television journalists. British reporter Michael Henderson (Dillane), a vet of the front lines, is so rattled by what he witnesses in Sarajevo that he makes it his mission to smuggle an orphan (Nusevic) out of Bosnia. Harrelson plays Flynn, a gonzo American journalist who braves the “14th worst place on earth” with Henderson, though he manages to maintain a professional detachment from the carnage. An intelligent and powerfully chilling depiction of war, Welcome to Sarajevo should not be missed.