In the Land of Blood and Honey

2011 "Love can change what we want… war can change who we are"
4.7| 2h7m| R| en
Details

During the Bosnian War, Danijel, a soldier fighting for the Serbs, re-encounters Ajla, a Bosnian who's now a captive in his camp he oversees. Their once promising connection has become ambiguous as their motives have changed.

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Reviews

Evengyny Thanks for the memories!
Stoutor It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.
TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.
Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.
i_bitu It took me years to see the film and despite the bad reviews I thought of giving it the benefit of the doubt BUT huh it's such a bad bad film. Poorly acted, no reasonable storyline. The dialog seems a direct translation from the English language and on top it's not accurately portraying the circumstances at the time. Shame the film could have done so much more to tell what happened.
drrodrigohermida I hesitated before seeing this movie. In general I do not like movies that show too horrors of war, not because I want to ignore the darkest moments of human history, but because usually I try to make the movie business a more pleasant experience. That said ... not too convinced I saw the movie. Obviously tells a story from the point of view that the director decided. Maybe many in Serbia do not like it looks for them, but unfortunately, what it shows is what happened. The findings of mass graves, the stories of mass rapes, concentration camps, snipers, ethnic cleansings, etc show what the world knows (or has been known as discovering more horrors). However, the director has the obvious right to tell the story that comes to mind from her the point of view. If the Serbs do not like, then make their own movie showing Muslims as evil. From the cinematographic point of view, it is not the most brilliant film of the century, but also to give it 1 or 2 star or say it's the worst movie in the world? Please! Perhaps so many negative reviews it has is because it gave a key ... really says something then.
maurice yacowar Perhaps if this film had not been written and directed by the beautiful Angelina Jolie it would be recognized as one of the great war films. Its distinctive focus is the victimization of women in war. An end title tells us 50,000 women were raped in the Bosnian war. In the title's variation on the Promised Land, the phrase 'milk and honey' is supplanted by 'blood and honey.' That is, murder replaces sustenance, rape love, betrayal trust, and humanity is supplanted by the murderous machinery of war.One soldier tells Danijel that his pregnant wife must be delivering a son because a little daughter would drive him mad with doting. In the context his madness would have a different source: her doom to become another victim of a soldier's rape.The larger theme is the pervasiveness of division. The first shot is an aerial view of the landscape, A slash of river divides the Serbs and Bosnians. The people get along well enough to enjoy a dance together, where the Bosnian Moslem Ajla charmingly connects with the Serb soldier Danijel. Their promising romance is interrupted when a bomb shatters the club.When they next meet Ajla is a prisoner and Danijel the camp commander. That power gap inhibits both their attraction, until her humiliation drives them together. The tender eroticism of their first lovemaking derives from the refuge each finds in the other, she from the other Serb soldiers' brutality and he from the callousness of his job, personified by his father the general. Even Danijel's protection fails when he is transferred to Sarajevo. They are reunited when she, having escaped the first camp, falls in with the Bosnian underground and agrees to let herself be captured to enable her comrades to get at Danijel, now more murderous than his father. Their lovemaking turns wild from Danijel's doubting her. The division of that promising romantic couple gives way to the division within each character. Danijel is torn between his love for her and his father's hatred of the Bosnians, for what they have done to the Serbs. Ajla overcomes her emotions for Danijel to avenge the Serbs' murder of her infant nephew. So neither a passionate love nor a driven character's mission can survive the division by war.In her first scene Ajla is painting a self-portrait, in relatively naturalistic style. At the end we see her final self-portrait, a more expressionistic one in which she seems to have imposed her own splotchy image on the portrait Danijel's father ordered her to make of him, before he ordered her rape by another brute soldier. In this painting Ajla tries to expunge the general and her lover. Her ultimate portrait is what Danijel makes when his bullet to her head leaves an abstract red brushstroke against the canvas of the white wall. Bereft of all his resolve and mission he surrenders to the UN peacekeepers as a war criminal. In another form of self-portraiture Each character discovers him/herself from the tests of the war. In their night visit to the art gallery Ajla teaches Danijel that in art the most important part is the empty spaces, where the artist decides to do nothing. The war is the something the parties should not be doing. The war discovers the vacancy in both warring parties and the war's emptying of all the people's hearts, whether the respective ethnic communities or the central lovers, both together and alone.The film should not be judged as a documentary record of this war. As a fiction its thematic sweep covers a larger issue: every war's undermining of nature, humanity, and the positive sustenance of our feminine nature.
spiricpredrag The story was sequenced without actual lead. No reality was involved, in one scene Aila was brutally raped in next she looks happy and having sex with her loving man etc. There are traces of true but whole story of Bosnian war was completely simplified. This looks like a bad copy of Emir Kusturica movie "Life is a miracle" 2004. Angelina Jolly should look this movie and she wouldn't probably never made this film. At the end it looks like somebody ordered cheap story for daily use. Pity! On the other hands actors did professional job. Scenes and environment are very realistic and authentic. Music is somehow out of story. I think that scenario had potential but with lot of changes and adjustment.