Angelina Jolie has hit back at criticism of her directorial debut, saying most people back her portrayal of a love story between a Serbian man and Bosnian woman on the eve of the 1992-95 Balkans conflict.
Speaking in Paris ahead of next week’s premiere of a very different film — romantic action comedy The Tourist in which she stars with Johnny Depp — Jolie said her intention had never been to stoke controversy with her movie set in wartime Bosnia.
Bosnian victims of sexual violence during the 1990s have written to the UN, for which the Oscar-winning actress is a goodwill ambassador, saying she didn’t deserve the position and did not know enough about the ethnic conflict.
“There’s one person who has a gripe,” Jolie said.
“The absolute majority of the people, population, the cast, prime minister, president have been extremely supportive,” she said, adding that 95 per cent of the film’s cast had lived through the war.”
Jolie, who also wrote the screenplay, said she had initially set out to just write to express her frustrations over how long the international community took to intervene in conflicts.
“It kept leaning towards Yugoslavia at the time, I wanted to learn more about it and the people, the more I read and learnt I was drawn to that part of the world,” she said.
“I met artists from that part of the world and found they were extraordinary for what they’d gone through, so I wanted to give them a platform.”
