Bosnian officials revoke filming licence for Jolie film

LONDON - The production of Angelina Jolie’s directorial debut on the Bosnian war has been thrown into jeopardy after the country officials revoked permission to shoot the film.

Jolie has already started shooting the untitled drama in Hungary and planned to film the war time love story in Bosnian cities of Sarajevo and Zenica.

However, the authorities have banned production from moving to the country amid outrage from women’s wartime victims’ groups, stemming from confusion over the plot.

While some reports say the film would tell the story of a Serbian man and Bosnian woman who fall in love in the middle of the Bosnian war, Bosnian press reported the movie would be a love story between a Muslim woman and her Serbian rapist, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

“This is misleading history. Among thousands of testimonies by women raped during the war, there is not a single one that tells of a love story between a victim and her rapist. We will not allow anyone to falsify our pain,” said a spokesperson for the Association of Women Victims of War in Sarajevo.

International organisations have estimated that thousands of women were raped during the Bosnian war.

“They no longer have the authorisation to shoot in Bosnia. They will have it if they send us the scenario with a story which will be different from what we have been told by people who have read it,” Gavrilo Grahovac, the culture minister of the Muslim-Croat federation - one of the two political entities in post-war Bosnia, told Bosnian radio.

Grahovac said revoking the filming licence was a way to “express our disapproval for the shooting of a movie which does not tell the truth and hurts a large number of victims”.