Angelina Jolie has aroused praise and criticism in Bosnia with her first film as a director, a story of love and war set during the bloody Balkans conflict.


She is Hollywood's highest-paid actress and one half of its most glamorous couple, accustomed to life on the red carpet, her instantly-recognisable face looking out from glossy magazine covers.

This time, however, Angelina Jolie is being feted for her work behind rather than in front of the camera with her directorial debut - a harrowing story of love and war in Bosnia.

Even before the release of In the Land of Blood and Honey, the Oscar-winner garnered her first directing honour, winning the Producers' Guild of America special award for portrayal of social issues.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has just shortlisted the film, which Jolie also wrote, in the best foreign language category for the Golden Globes. And her father, the actor Jon Voight, from whom she was long estranged, joined her for the festivities in a public display of reconciliation.

But in the Balkans, another world from the star-studded American premieres and glitzy after-parties, the film is inflaming old and deeply-held emotions.

The passionate reaction reflects the deep ethnic rifts that still divide Bosnia ahead of next year's 20th anniversary of the bloody fratricidal conflict that claimed an estimated 200,000 lives.

Former Bosnian Muslim war prisoners and relatives of massacre victims, some of them initially critical, lauded In the Land of Blood and Honey after being invited to a private screening to allay earlier fears about the subject matter.

But the leader of a Bosnian Serb prisoners group has slammed the film for its allegedly one-sided depiction of the atrocities and called for it to be banned from the country's Serbian areas.

And a Croatian journalist is suing Jolie and her team for plagiarism, claiming that she borrowed large chunks of the plot from a 2007 book he wrote about a love story set against the backdrop of the vicious collapse of Yugoslavia.

Jolie's husband Brad Pitt - with whom she has three biological and three adopted children - has produced several films.

But the 36-year-old actress has now beaten him to the director's chair with In the Land of Blood and Honey, which was shot in English, Serbian and Croatian, and has a cast of actors from across the former Yugoslavia - several of whom were injured, lost relatives and even fought in the war.

The film, which opens in the US this Friday [DEC 23], centers on the fictional relationship between a Muslim woman artist and Serbian army officer. Once romantically involved before the war erupted in April 1992, they are reunited when she is detained in a Serbian internment camp that he commands.

The existence of the camps, where rape, brutality and murder were common, shocked the world as an ethnic cleansing campaign was waged on European soil.

There was outrage in Sarajevo during filming amid erroneous media reports that the film actually depicted the story of a Muslim camp rape victim who falls in love with her Serbian attacker.

The Bosnian authorities revoked her filming permit and she finished shooting the movie in Budapest in neighbouring Hungary. Jolie urged critics to reserve judgment until they saw film, which she said was "a love story, not a political statement".

And after the private screening, Hatizda Mehmedovic, the head of an association of mothers of the 8,000 Muslim men and boys massacred at Srebrenica, struck a very different tone from her criticism last year.

She thanked Jolie for "her intellectual and financial investment" and said: "The film is so strong, so difficult and it would have been stronger if it was shot in Bosnia."

Murat Tahirovic, who heads an association of ex-prisoners of war, added: "This film is deeply moving for the victims who experienced all of these things.

"It is completely objective and it really tells the facts of what happened during the war. She succeeded in telling the story of the whole war in her film and to show... situations that detainees faced - mass executions, rapes, [being used as] human shields and all the other horrors."

But Branislav Djukic, who heads the Bosnian Serb Association of Camp Prisoners, had a very different reaction after seeing a trailer. He said that the film "is showing lies" as it depicts only Serbs as rapists during the war and called for it to be barred from cinemas in the autonomous Serbian half of Bosnia. "We'll do our best to ban the film," he said.

Nearly two decades after war broke out, a clutch of star-name films are focusing on the brutal conflict and its fall-out. The Whistleblower, starring Rachel Weisz and Vanessa Redgrave, based on the true story of a United Nations official's attempts to expose a cover-up of sex slave trafficking in post-war Bosnia, was released earlier this year.

And in Sarajevo, Penelope Cruz and Emile Hirsch recently began filming the adaptation of Twice Born, an Italian best-seller about a single mother who brings her son to the Bosnian capital, where his father died during the war.

Jolie and the film's producers are also fighting a lawsuit by Josip Knezevic, a Croatian writer who claims that the film copies the plot of his book The Soul Shattering. He said that he had extensive talks with one of the film's co-producers.

Jolie has brushed aside the claim as "par for the course. It happens on almost every film." She said that her travels to various current and former war zones, including Bosnia, in her role as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees inspired her to make the film.

By contrast, when the Bosnian war broke out, she was a "young punk" who was unaware of the horrors that were being inflicted on another continent, she said during interviews to promote the film's release.

She said that her celebrity status had allowed her to tackle a painful topic that is far from typical Hollywood fare. But she also acknowledged that some other stars have been mocked for heavyweight vanity projects that have fallen flat at the box office.

And she cautioned that the film would be hard to watch.

"It's a very hard conflict to understand and region to completely understand. And I think it's very hard to watch intentionally," she said after the New York premiere.

"It's brutal, it shows brutality and we hope it gives people an authentic feel to be inside of something that is uncomfortable."