Angelina Jolie acted perfectly poised talking to reporters Tuesday night before the screening of her feature directorial and screenwriting debut “In the Land of Blood and Honey.” But having just come from one of the Holocaust Museum’s haunting exhibits, she confessed to Yeas & Nays that it was a little hard to keep it together.
She and partner Brad Pitt has just visited “From Memory to Action,” the museum’s exhibition on genocide, which includes Srebrenica, the 1995 massacre that is included in her film. “I’m having trouble even speaking about it because I spent half an hour in this room where I did my best not to look at the walls and read everything because it was reminding me so much of everything I learned in the process of this film and all the beautiful people that I met that survived,” Jolie said. “It’s quite heavy.”
The film is indeed heavy. It takes place during the Bosnian War, depicting the changing relationship between lovers Ajla, a Bosnian Muslim painter, and Danijel, who becomes an officer in the Bosnian Serb Army. Along with genocide, there are scenes of rape and severe brutality, including Ajla’s infant nephew being thrown out a window and killed.
Besides teaching a Washington audience (which included D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg) more about the conflict, Jolie also talked about what her kids learned from the making of “In the Land of Blood and Honey.”
“They are friends with a lot of the children of the cast so they are friends with friends with people from all over former Yugoslavia,” she said. “They know a little bit about their country, they know a little bit about their food, and they know that they are friends.”
