Welcome To Sarajevo/In This world (1997 & 2002, UK)

Even when considered separately, Michael Winterbottom’s Welcome to Sarajevo and In This World mark the English director as a socially committed auteur. Taken together, the blend of fiction and reality within both films (something Winterbottom will return to in the upcoming Road to Guantanamo) also speaks to his abilities as a technically and conceptually innovative artist.

The closest existing parallel for Sarajevo is probably Roland Joffe’s The Killing Fields – both films effectively fictionalize and extrapolate real events, featuring the stories of dedicated journalists who toe the line between an idealized objectivity and their human reactions to the terrifying events surrounding them. In Sarajevo, the central character (played wonderfully by Stephen Dillane) is a British journalist who risks both his job and his life to secret a Bosnian orphan out of the war-torn region and into his bucolic English-garden world (if there is one place where Winterbottom’s concepts falter, it is in his vision of England as supreme safe haven). While the film is firmly on the journalist’s side, it does not shy away from posing difficult questions about the responsibility of both individuals and the news media – what is more important, to walk down a sniper-infested street in order to help bear the dead away, or to tirelessly go on the air every night, advocating for social justice? For those (of whom I am one) a bit young to remember the horrors of the Bosnian war, simply substitute the Darfur crisis, and see how little things have changed in ten years, how easily the film’s specificity can translate to encompass so many different international crises.

As a film, Sarajevo exists firmly in a world of fictionalized reality. In This World effectively blurs the line between truth and fiction in its attempt to capture the lives of two Afghan refugees as they undertake a dangerous journey to the West. Netflix erroneously labels World as a documentary – though it is actually a work of feature filmmaking, Winterbottom uses the visual language of non-fiction in order to present an emotionally and textually convincing story. In fact, the filmmakers go one step further, not simply utilizing familiar documentary styles, but actually basing their story as close to life as possible. The two young non-actors who portray the refugees are really displaced Afghans from in and around one of Pakistan’s largest refugee camps. Their journey is based on real-life accounts from others who have traveled this same path, shot by a minimal crew in real locations between the Middle East and the West, and more than a few real people are utilized as actors and characters along the way. World’s unusual structure succeeds incredibly well – Winterbottom has made a beautiful film, one that is both visually arresting as well as emotionally and conceptually engaging.

One has to wonder, after a look at these projects (coupled, perhaps, with the director’s recent, not entirely fictional, Tristram Shandy), what exactly Winterbottom believes a director’s responsibility to be when it comes to distinguishing fact from fiction. Would Sarajevo and World have been as powerful had the director not brought his stories so close to reality? Would Tristram have been nearly so funny if the meta-meta-meta narrative was discarded in favor of a straight literary adaptation? As a socially motivated filmmaker, Winterbottom wears his heart on his sleeve, but his brain never makes simple choices, and as a result, both Sarajevo and World exist in a much more complex world than other recent films about similar subjects, such as Harrison’s Flowers and Dirty Pretty Things.