When Angelina Jolie announced via a vaguely worded statement over the weekend that she was working on a romance film set during the Bosnian War, it was unclear exactly how she would be involved in the project-- she said she was making it, but that could mean anything from a hands-off executive producer to Jolie actually handling the camera herself.
Now, thanks to an announcement at the official GK Films blog, we finally know the deal: Jolie is in fact writing and directing the film, with plans to start shooting this fall with a cast of actors of various ethnicities form the former Yugoslavia. The story sounds like your typical wartime romance, about a Bosnian man and a Serbian woman who fall in love on the eve of war and try to stay together while the bombs fall. The Playlist also dug up an interview in the Serbian paper Blic with actor Rade Serbedzija, who confirmed he took a role in the film after initially turning it down:
When she was told why I had rejected her offer, Angelina contacted me by phone and asked me to read the scenario. The text is fantastic. It is a love story about a young Serb and a Muslim woman who fell in love several evenings before beginning of war in Bosnia. That’s how film begins. Then follows war madness. The action follows war events with young Muslim woman ending up in a Serbian concentration camp from where she is somehow saved by the young Serb. Their love becomes passionate but impossible.
R Serbedzija will be playing the father of the Serbian character-- "a nationalist, but not a negative character" as he explained it. Jolie seems to rightly be walking on eggshells as she tries to step into this complicated region to make a film about a brutal past that's not that far behind. It's an odd move for one of the biggest actresses in Hollywood, but given how iconoclastic Jolie has been throughout her entire career, not all that surprising either.
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