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She says in the beginning "Good evening. Thank you for coming" in Bosnian. It was cute and she pronounced it perfectly. "I made this film not just to remind the world of such a dark time in history, one that should not be forgotten, but also to show the world the immense talent, beautiful art and extraordinary country, that is Bosnia. I know this will bring back many painful memories, and I know this will be difficult to watch, but I hope when you do, it does not just remind you of what you’ve suffered, but also reminds you on all that you survived. I'm so happy to be here tonight. I love Bosnia, I love all of you. (We love you too Angie)"
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Sarajevo has just seen the premiere of controversial new film - In the Land of Blood and Honey - a love story set during the Bosnian War. It is the directorial debut of Angelina Jolie, and the BBC's Allan Little has been speaking to her about the experience.
She seemed momentarily taken aback by the warmth with which she was welcomed at Sarajevo's Zetra stadium. Five thousand people rose to their feet to applaud Angelina Jolie as she took to the stage to introduce the film, her directorial debut.
"It was one of the most amazing nights of my life, to be a part of that," she told me. "You take people's stories, their histories and you try to do your best by them but you're not making a documentary; it's an artistic interpretation, a film.
"And you see these people sitting here, reliving the worst parts of their lives and you think are they going to embrace it, or are they going to get upset? And when they stood I thought I was going to cry."
In the Land of Blood and Honey is not an easy film to watch. It depicts, in bleak and chilling detail, the brutal process by which hundreds of thousands of non-Serbs were removed from their homes in the campaign that came to be known as ethnic cleansing.
Civilians are casually gunned down in the street; women are repeatedly raped.
Many in the audience were in tears as they left. Most I spoke to said the film had captured the reality of what they had lived through in the war years - that it had told Bosnia's story with honesty.
"It is hard for me to talk about this. It is very emotional," one woman said. "The film is good. I am glad she made it."
But go to the Serbian half of the country and you enter a parallel universe.
Here, atrocities committed in the name of the Serb nation, aimed at carving out an ethnically pure Serb territory in Bosnia, are routinely denied. Many argue that the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, in which 8,000 men and boys were killed, simply didn't happen.
Here, Serb leaders have told Angelina Jolie that she is not welcome in the Serb areas, and that her film will not be shown.
Dragan Mutapdzija is a Serb veteran of the 1992-95 conflict and was himself held in a war-time prison camp for several months.
"Serbs never deny that crimes were committed," he said. "But they were committed by individuals and not by the whole nation. This film demonises our nation. Yet again the Serbs are depicted as the bad guys."
The film depicts good and bad on both sides. But overwhelmingly the perpetrators are Serbs and the victims Muslims.
Angelina Jolie rejects claims that the film lacks balance. "The war was not balanced," she says. "I can't understand people who are looking for a balance that did not exist. There are some people who don't want to be reminded of these things, some even who deny that these things even happened. Those people are going to be angry."
Bosnia's wounds are not healed. This film, for all its harrowing honesty, reveals a country unreconciled to its painful past, and bitterly divided still even on the question of what really happened here almost 20 years ago.
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"Thank you. It means so much to all of us -- it means so much to me -- and I can't tell you how much it means to be here with all of you and to share this film. That you're receiving it so warmly means the world to me. Fala"
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Angelina Jolie's directorial debut, In the Land of Blood and Honey, was intended to remind the world of the horrors of the Bosnian war which began 20 years ago, and trigger a debate among Bosnians over what happened and why. But it has succeeded most in exposing the depth of the rifts in a country that many fear is moving away from reconciliation and drifting once more towards dangerous instability. Since the film opened, with a peace award at the Berlin film festival on Monday and a premiere before 5,000 people in Sarajevo on Tuesday night, Jolie and several Serbian members of the cast have received threats.
"There were things sent to me, there were things posted online," Jolie told the Guardian in an interview in Sarajevo. "The cast … have never complained to me about these threats but I've heard through other people it was happening … one of them did have their windows smashed in on their cars and someone else had an issue when their phone was hacked and emails were sent out saying they were from them and saying they had been hurt."
"It was a scary thought that someone was thinking along those lines," Jolie said, adding that she had given the multiethnic cast the option to leave the region, where In the Land of Blood and Honey is being shown for the first time this week, but that none of them took up the offer.Jolie has abandoned a plan to attend a premiere of the film in the Serbian capital, Belgrade, but denied it was a direct result of the threats.
"The physical threats are not what most bothered me because I have been to so many different countries where there are different kinds of threats, being in Afghanistan and other places as an outspoken American woman," she said.
"It was more that … with a film like this, you don't want it to be used as a tool … especially in an election year, where people are deciding to label it without having seen it, and try to incite aggression and violence."....
...As many as 50,000 Bosnian women, mainly Muslim, are thought to have been raped in the course of the war. The Hague tribunal on Balkan war crimes declared it a "crime against humanity".
An estimated 100,000 people were killed in the war, including 8,000 Muslim men and boys murdered at Srebrenica in 1995, which the Hague tribunal has declared an act of genocide.
The current Bosnian Serb leadership rejects the findings of the tribunal and other international investigations, and Jolie's film is not being shown in the Republika Srpska, the Serbian entity which makes up more than half of Bosnia.
Vladimir Ljevar, who runs a multiplex cinema in the main Serbian city of Banja Luka and controls much of the cinema distribution in the Republika Srpska, told the Guardian: "I have seen the film at a screening for distributors in Belgrade. The impression I had of the movie is definitely lousy."
Ljevar added: "I wish I had a multiplex cinema in Sarajevo so I can also make a profit on it. Here I cannot. There are simply some films that are acceptable for Sarajevo, but not for Banja Luka."
In the small snowbound town of Pale, the Serbs' wartime capital about 12 miles from Sarajevo, a group of law students all said they had no intention of going to see the film.
Zeljko Stankovic, who was just two when the war started, said: "It would be an uncomfortable feeling. How would an American feel about watching a film with Americans portrayed doing things like that?"
Back in Sarajevo, where the film was greeted by a standing ovation in a former Winter Olympic stadium, Jolie argued against the suggestion that the film had failed because of its rejection by most Serbs, pointing out that some people in Republika Srpska were trying to get hold of the video independently.
"If anything, it has proven what is happening in the country. It has reminded people of the complications of the region, of the way people view each other. And also many people have risen up like these people who are doing private screenings in their homes," she said.
"Many people have written to me. People are speaking up and not allowing someone to tell them how they should feel about the film, about each other, about history, and I think this is the extraordinary thing."
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I know somebody already made a Brangelina Megapost, but the other op didn't include some of the interviews. Please accept this post, thank you :)