November 26, 1997 | Early in Welcome to Sarajevo, a jaded TV journalist explains the addictive appeal of covering the bloody civil war in the former Yugoslavia: “Big guns. Little children. Evil men. It’s great television.”
Trouble is, it wasn’t great enough to stir the world’s conscience, or even generate much viewer interest, during the very worst days of the conflict. At one point in Michael Winterbottom’s hard-edged but soft-hearted film, which was shot on location in 1996 just after a cease-fire took effect, a British correspondent learns his report on a “bread-line massacre” was shelved to make room for a report on Royal Family upheavals. A producer breaks the bad news: “The Duke and Duchess of York are getting divorced. Or separated. I can’t remember which.”
By turns darkly comical and passionately angry, Welcome to Sarajevo deftly mixes newsreel footage, dramatic re-enactments and fact-based fiction, to persuasively evoke the day-to-day chaos of a war that most Western observers preferred to ignore. Woody Harrelson is amusingly gonzo as a superstar American TV reporter who turns out to be courageous under fire. When a fellow journalist chides him for making himself appear more important than the country that he’s covering, Harrelson’s reply is at once amusingly egotistical and chillingly accurate: “Oddly enough, back home, nobody’s heard of Sarajevo — but everybody’s heard of me.”
But the real star of the piece is British actor Stephen Dillane, who subtly conveys a sense of moral outrage at odds with objective professionalism as ITN reporter Michael Henderson. (The character is a fictional version of British TV journalist Michael Nicholson, whose book Natasha’s Story is the basis for Frank Cottrell Boyce’s script.) In the course of covering the hell of Sarajevo, Henderson is so impacted by what he sees that he decides to rescue a 9-year-old Bosnian girl by smuggling her out of the country. He is a hero, of sorts, but he would be the last to admit it. “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” he admits to his wife back home in London during a late-night, long-distance call. “I simply realized that I could. And after that, there really didn’t seem to be any reason for me not to.”
