The first poster of Angelina Juliersquo;s first directorial film ldquo;In the Land of Blood and Honeyrdquo; is exposed to the public, full of abstraction and minimalism. You can see a couple of man and woman standing in a site full of blood sprays. This indicates how a father and children, a mother and children, sisters and friends survive in a horrible war.
rdquo;In the Land of Blood and Honeyrdquo; which is shot by Angelina Julie herself for the first time, is about a story recounting how a father and children, a mother and children, sisters and friends survive themselves in war. Even if their relationships are perfect, strong, mutually merciful or extremely intimate, the war still brings a lot of variables to those ties. Julie demonstrates that on the pale world map stands a couple of lovers tainted with blood in order to raise audiencesrsquo; awareness of emotional entanglement aroused by war and love.
rdquo;In the Land of Blood and Honeyrdquo;, this story derives from Angelinarsquo;s personal experience in refugee camps in Sarajevo. The film tells us a love story at war time: a Serbian man (Goran Kostic) falls in love with a Bosnian Muslim woman (Zana Makati Victor). But when Yugoslavia splits into several parts between 1991 and 1992, the Bosnia-Herzegovina war breaks out, their life is forced to change completely. This Europe’s largest regional war after the Second World War turns them into Romeo and Juliet of the modern times.
Just as Julie says, ldquo;Itrsquo;s just a story about love, not politics.rdquo; As for its dramatic name, it comes from the ldquo;Biblerdquo; that God bestows the name ldquo;In a Land of Milk and Honeyrdquo; on Israel, accounting for its fertility. This similar title enables people to think back to the war times, disastrous: at the beginning of Bosnia-Herzegovina war in 1992, more than 10 million people died out of innocence. Although this has nothing to do with politics, but with the war-torn trace closely.
It is reported that the film will be released in English and Bosnian version, officially launched on 23 December in small-scale theaters in North America.