Sniper Alley revisited - this time with blanks

CINEMA: For four years the war in the former Yugoslavia left outsiders feeling helpless and bewildered. Once it was over, the film-makers were quick to move in to try to make sense of the conflict, and stories with a Bosnian setting are already starting to reach the screen. So has European cinema found its Vietnam? By Lee Marshall

They've started shooting again in Sarajevo. Hardly had the last Bosnian Serbs abandoned their positions in the hills overlooking the town than the film crews moved in.

For four years before the Dayton accord was signed in December 1995, the only filming that went on in the besieged city was of the CNN variety - with the exception of a few documentaries put together by independent film-makers who stayed on, and a few who came in from outside. Fiction was put on hold until afterwards, just as it had been in Vietnam: of the 80 or so Hollywood films which deal directly with that war or its effect on returning vets, only a handful were made before the American pull-out in 1975 (and these were mainly propaganda movies, like the dire John Wayne vehicle, The Green Berets).

Since the end of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, four European feature films set wholly or partly in Sarajevo have been completed, and a number of others are in the pipeline. Two will be premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, starting on Wednesday. From Michael Winterbottom, the director of Jude, there is Welcome to Sarajevo, which is in competition and hotly tipped for a prize; Perfect Circle is the work of local director Ademir Kenovic and is financed by French and Dutch partners. It is being screened as part of the Fringe Directors' Fortnight.

Kenovic is a member of the Sarajevo Group of Authors, a loose collective which acted as a forum for the city's writers and artists during the siege years. His film is a simple story of everyday resistance during the conflict. A local poet takes in two young boys, orphaned in a bomb attack, and attempts to reunite them with an aunt in Germany. Kenovic describes Perfect Circle as "not a political film - though making a film in these circumstances is in itself political. It projects a strong political message, but it's really just a film about people. One of the themes is the difficulty of telling outsiders what happened here."

The outsiders, on the other hand, want to get in. Winterbottom has declared that: "My intentionis to try to see from the inside what really happened just a few miles from us". His film is based on the experiences of the ITN reporter Michael Nicholson, whose attempt to smuggle a Bosnian child out of the country formed the subject of a book, Natasha's Story. All three of the Western European films about Bosnia use journalists as a way into the subject. The others are the Spanish Territorio Comanche (Comanche Territory), shown at the Berlin Festival earlier this year, and the Italian Il Carniere (literally "The Game Bag", to be released as The Sniper), set in an unnamed but immediately recognisable Balkan city.

The reliance on the media viewpoint is understandable: for most of us outside Sarajevo, those endless television and press reports were the only "reality" we had to go on. For Winterbottom, it is precisely the impotence and frustration generated by this armchair diet of bombs and suffering that interests him. "How is it possible that we sat through this war, watching in our living rooms on television and then flicking over to the sitcom on the other side and doing nothing?" he says. "How is it possible that these things were happening to the people of a European city while we sat there and watched?"

Any journalist who was in Sarajevo will tell you that this war was different. The press corps shared stories, and television news networks - notoriously competitive, even in war zones - agreed to pool footage. There is always an esprit de corps among war correspondents - but in Bosnia there was a closer bond, which Italian journalist Gigi Riva explains as being generated by "the need to make people back home understand, and the frustration when you realised that the message wasn't getting through. Never before have I come home from an assignment with such an urge to campaign, to get on the phone to the politicians, to collar people in the street and tell them what really happened". It is this, says Riva, rather than the desire to cash in, which explains the barrowloads of books that returning journalists have written about the conflict. It also explains why some turned to direct action, ranging from Nicholson's attempt to do something for a single child to more co-ordinated efforts, such as the War Child charity set up by BBC film-makers Bill Leeson and David Wilson after a visit to the war zones in 1993.

But whatever other aims they may have, feature films are commercial operations. So far, three films made by directors from the former Yugoslavia which deal directly or tangentially with the civil war have been produced: Emir Kusturica's Underground, Boro Draskovic's Vukovar Poste Restante and Srdjan Dragojevic's Pretty Flame, Pretty Village. The latter two have been seen mainly at film festivals, and while Underground won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1995, it was a commercial flop (so much so that the director announced that he was abandoning cinema altogether - a decision he later went back on).

Foreign producers and distributors know that complicated wars in which there are no easily identifiable goodies and baddies don't sell. Gigi Riva worked on the treatment and the script of The Sniper, which tells the story of three laddish Italian hunters who are on a shooting party in the former Yugoslavia (once a hunter's paradise) when they are trapped by the outbreak of war. Riva admits that the choice of subject was at least partly dictated by the need to make a potentially alienating experience palatable to outsiders. "We couldn't allow ourselves an internal point of view," he says. "We needed somebody there that the audience could identify with. We went through all the obvious candidates: journalists, mercenaries, aid workers, until we hit on the idea of the hunters." The same homing instinct is apparent in the title of Winterbottom's film, which was changed from plain old Sarajevo to Welcome to Sarajevo as late as the post-production stage. The former is simply not saleable, while the latter manages somehow to have its irony and eat it.

Territorio Comanche takes the most obvious route into the anarchy: it tells the story of a troupe of hard-bitten television journalists and the way their cocky, seen-it-all-before attitude is dismantled by what they witness. It also attempts to use the power-play within the group as a metaphor for the civil strife raging around them. The problem is that the comparison cannot but appear grossly disproportionate, just as director Gerardo Herrero's comments on the difficulties he encountered while filming ring hollow when set against what Sarajevo's inhabitants went through every day for four years: "Financing the film was a nightmare, scouting for locations a journey through hell, and shooting it endless anguish." Part of this anguish, it appears, had to do with the fact that the IFOR peacekeepers were far more effective in banning the use of dummy weapons than their UN predecessors had been in dealing with the real things.

Sarajevans, when not at the end of their tether, are famously diplomatic. In the autumn of 1994 the Bosnian Prime Minister, Haris Silajdzic, was interviewed by Noel Malcolm for Modern Painters at an exhibition in London of paintings by the British war artist Peter Howson. Though Malcolm was keen to elicit condemnation of what he saw as the voyeuristic impulse behind Howson's paintings ("as if the people of the country were to be observed like animals in a zoo"), Silajdzic refused to rise to the bait: "The political establishment in the West has failed," he said. "Its response is non-existent. That does not mean that the artistic response should not take place ... I know of no other way in which one could explain the feeling one gets when one looks into the eyes of a grey-haired seven-year- old boy. I have experienced that; but I cannot explain it to you. Only art can do so".

But these days, artists are as hungry for stories as journalists. An essay could be written (and no doubt has been) on the artistic exploitation of the 1994 Miss Sarajevo beauty contest, held while the mortars were still raining down on the Bosnian capital. The event itself was filmed by the American video-artist Bill Carter for his documentary Miss Sarajevo. The video prompted Bono of U2 to write the lyrics to the best-selling song of the same name, on which he duetted with Luciano Pavarotti ("Is there time for kohl and lipstick, a time for cutting hair?" Bono wondered). Meanwhile, in Australia, the playwright Louis Nowra was squeezing a black comedy, Miss Bosnia, out of the pageant.

Miro Purivatra, the director of the Obola arts centre in Sarajevo ("a sort of Bosnian ICA", he explains), is, like Silajdzic, open-minded about this pick 'n mix approach to the war: "Maybe some people have used Sarajevo for their own purposes," he says, "but I think it is good that the issues are being explored from lots of different angles." It is ironic, though, that the West's discovery of Sarajevo as a subject for art comes just at a time when local artists are experiencing a post-war block: "We haven't yet taken our distance from those days," Purivatra says. " The war was a time of frenetic cultural activity in Sarajevo, but it produced more quantity than quality. We had the adrenalin in our blood. We had to create every day just in order to keep going."

Sarajevo has started to rebuild its schools, hospitals and houses - but it will be some time before it manages to rebuild its image. This used to be, as a pre-war guidebook put it, "one of the most interesting and charming cities in Yugoslavia". Sarajevo's Home Cooking - a book of recipes published in the States in April 1991 - could never be put out today. After the events of March 1992 to December 1995, "Sarajevo" is a name we automarically associate with death-tolls, burning buildings and nervously grinning militiamen. It is a moot point whether celluloid consecration will help to change that image; there is a danger that it might simply reinforce it.

Sarajevo's most famous independent radio station, Radio Zid, was exemplary in refusing to act up to the role the foreign media tried to impose on it (of the "plucky young DJs keep the show on the road" variety). In a document released on the Internet in the middle of the siege, the Radio Zidders launched an appeal that was nothing to do with money, or blankets, or provisions. "How would you feel", they asked, "if you were trying to think positively about your future and the future of your children, if you wanted to believe that you could rebuild your city, and you were told every day by powerful foreigners who controlled your diet and much of your television news that you were so traumatised that you could not trust your own thoughts? That you should not feel proud but lifeless, hopeless, forlorn?"

Even the normally tactful Purivatra is convinced that films like Welcome to Sarajevo notch up a debt to the city and its inhabitants that will only be fully repaid when "the directors and the actors come over to show us the result, and give us the chance to discuss it with them". The ball is in our court.

'Welcome to Sarajevo' opens in Britain in the autumn.