Last week, celebrity gossip news made the mainstream with the announcement that the Bosnian government was revoking permission for Angelina Jolie’s new film project. Originally sold to the government as a “love story” about “a couple that meets on the eve of the war”, controversy has erupted with rumours that the film is actually about a Muslim rape victim who falls in love with her Serbian rapist.
According to the AFP:
Hollywood trade daily Variety reported that the film will tell the story of a Serbian man and Bosnian woman who fall in love in the middle of the war, but are driven to take different paths.
However Bosnian press reported the movie would be a love story between a Muslim victim and her rapist, a Serb, causing outrage among victims’ groups.
“They no longer have the authorisation to shoot in Bosnia. They will have it if they send us the scenario with a story which will be different from what we have been told by people who read it,” Grahovac told the radio.
The culture minister said that while he could not stop the film from being shot somewhere else, revoking the filming license was a way to “express our disapproval for the shooting of a movie which does not tell the truth and hurts a large number of victims”.
Jolie has already started shooting the film in Hungary and was planning to continue it in Bosnia.
Jolie is in hot water as the writer, producer, and director of the film. Women’s war victims groups have understandably expressed concern to the government:
“This is misleading history. Among thousands of testimonies by women raped during the war, there is not a single one that tells of a love story between a victim and her rapist,” Bakira Hasecic, the head of the Women Victims of War Association in Sarajevo, stated as quoted by AFP. “We will not allow anyone to falsify our pain.”
I understand Jolie is likely motivated by the assured Oscar whispers that come with such controversy, but I have to say this crosses the line. Let’s start by setting aside the ethnic element and the form of the sexual violence in this film, extreme (and genocidal) war rape. Let’s say it’s just a film about a woman who falls in love with her rapist. That is offensive enough. It is apologetic and undermines decades of work on women’s rights. But then to suggest that one of the tens of thousands of women who were systematically and violently sexually assaulted in an attempt to exterminate their ethnic group, to impregnate them with Serbian seed, to sexually torture them for the purpose of destroying not only these women, but their families and communities, could turn around and fall in love with a commander of one of these rape camps – it’s too much.
One rumour is that the love between the Muslim woman and the Serbian man is born during the war after the aforementioned Serbian soldier had brutally raped the Muslim woman and cut off her breast.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) found systematic use of sexual violence, sexual enslavement, rape, and torture by the Bosnian Serb armed forces as an ‘instrument of terror’. They declared that a “hellish orgy of persecution” occurred in various camps across Bosnia. Here is one woman’s testimony:
FWS-87 was in seventh grade and a virgin when it began. In court, she couldn’t remember how many times she was assaulted during eight months of torture, gang rape and enslavement.
FWS-50 was assaulted by a Serb soldier armed with a hunting knife. He threatened to slash her skin in the shape of a crucifix if the Muslim woman refused to have sex.
FWS-105 said the drunken men did “whatever they wanted” to her. One bit her neck until she was covered with blood.
FWS-95 wept so loudly in court that her sobs were audible through the prosecutor’s microphone across the room. But she refused to let the proceedings be adjourned.
Here’s another:
Instead of a blindfold, the Serb soldiers bound Enisa’s eyes with their socks. The stench made her throw up, so they hit her until she learned that ‘Serb socks don’t smell’. Seven ‘heroes of the nation’ raped her and beat her for days. At first she resisted, so they brought her to her senses by knocking her teeth out with a rifle-butt and breaking her jaw. When she lost consciousness they would ‘give her a bath’, i.e. douse her in cold water. Terrified that she would be driven mad, she suddenly liked the idea and saw madness as a way out. She began singing Serb songs louder and louder, then dancing with the chetnik who had presumably butchered her husband. The soldiers were dumbfounded. They threatened her, held a knife to her throat, but she only sang louder. Believing she had gone off her head entirely, the soldiers paid less attention to her and she managed to escape, by hiding in a potato sack. When the journalist Seada Vranic spoke with Enisa a few months later, in July 1992, she saw before her a hunched, grey-haired old woman with a contorted face. That was just one month before Enisa’s twenty-eighth birthday.
How likely does it seem that these women would find love from these scenarios??
