The final test of friendship

A new drama tells the heartrending story of two close friends divided by the bloody battle for Sarajevo

If a Hollywood scriptwriter had invented the story of Shot Through the Heart, a new BBC film, he would have been laughed out of Tinseltown by incredulous studio execs. "Come off it," they would have told him. "That's ridiculous, it could never have happened." But it did.

Two Sarajevan men - Vlado, a Croat, and Slavko, a Serb - have been best friends since childhood. Both expert shots, they were teammates in the professional Yugoslav shooting squad. When war breaks out in their home- town in 1992, however, they are obliged to take up arms against each other. Vlado, who is married to a Muslim, is ordered to kill the Serbian sniper who is picking off Croatian and Muslim women and children in their street. He discovers to his horror that the marksman is the man he considers a brother.

What is so powerful about Shot Through the Heart is that it is a very human drama. It's about the destruction of a friendship between two people rather than the geo-political machinations of the Serbian government and the UN. Guy Hibbert, the writer, calls it "a story about husbands and wives - not about Douglas Hurd or Radovan Karadzic".

David Attwood, the film's director, recalls that "the first time I met Vlado in Sarajevo he got out his photo album and showed us pictures of him and Slavko as kids. Vlado was an ordinary person who just happened to get caught up in a war. We see Vlado as you or I in our own little house and hope people relate to that. It's war in a semi-detached suburb. People should be thinking `would I have done that?' about Vlado's decisions. The power of the film lies in the degree to which the viewer identifies with Vlado and goes through the experience with him. It's a little story with very wide ramifications."

The director hopes that by focusing on the personal rather than the political, the film will avoid the "Bosnia fatigue" which has dogged previous offerings (Welcome to Sarajevo, for one). "In Shot Through the Heart you see very little politics," he says. "It is not about 700 years of Bosnian history. The central family happens to be Croat Muslim, but they could just as easily be one of the Serb families who stayed in Sarajevo throughout. Ethnic background, strange to say, in this film does not really matter."

Where Shot Through the Heart scores is in its very recognisable enactment of a moral dilemma. Linus Roache, who plays Vlado with a movingly vulnerable streak, talked to the real-life man about what it felt like to be asked to shoot your best friend. "His answer, quite rightly, was `it was war'. He had a job to do. He did what he felt was the right thing in that situation for the sake of his family and his city. It's interesting to watch a man, an everyman if you like, driven to an extraordinary situation to see how he responds. Is he going to use his skill for the greater good? Like Vlado says, `You never know how a human being is going to respond until they're tested'. If you had a gun and were in a room with Hitler, what would you do? You can't answer that until you're in that room."

For his part, Vlado is glad that his story stands for many that happened during that appalling period in Sarajevo. "In a way, I should be proud," he says, "because the film is about me and my family and how we survived these five terrible years. But then I think it is not about me and my family; it is about 100,000 families, some of whom had it a lot worse than I did."

Isn't there a danger of the whole enterprise seeming exploitative? Didn't the Sarajevans resent these foreign film-makers swanning in and hijacking their story? Apparently not. According to Attwood, "they felt they'd been ignored. They liked Welcome to Sarajevo, but felt it was more about journalism. They wanted us to tell a wide audience what had happened. Far from resenting us, they invited us into their homes."

This is borne out by Nicoletta Milasevic, a native Sarajevan who lived through the war and had to dodge sniper-fire every day on her one-and- a-half-hour walk to school. She acted as a translator on Shot Through the Heart. "Everything the film shows actually happened," she confirms. "If someone is going to use you, it's good that they use you in a positive and truthful way. Every family in Sarajevo has a similar story from the war. My mother's best friend was on the other side. On the first day of the war, she said to my mother: `We will not be able to speak to each other anymore', and that was the last time we heard from her. My mum was really angry. She thought, `How can someone who's been through so much with me change her opinion so quickly?'"

Milasevic reckons that the war can, in fact, be recounted more accurately by people from outside the fervid atmosphere of the former Yugoslavia. "If you're an outsider, it's easier to tell the story. It's harder for us because we're still full of pain and anger. We couldn't be that objective."

With bloody events continuing in Kosovo, the Balkan region is again being plunged into conflict. But Milasevic remains hearteningly optimistic about the prospects for Sarajevo - an optimism that is reflected in the spirited resilience of the characters depicted in Shot Through the Heart. "I can't understand teenagers who complain," says the 22-year-old who is half Serbian and half Muslim. "They should be happy because they don't know what I know. The war has taught me to really appreciate what life gives you. I want us to be like Germany after the Second World War. We should say: `OK, we made mistakes, we're not proud of what we did, but now we have a chance to build a better future.' We don't want to hate people just because of their name."

`Shot Through the Heart' tomorrow 10.10pm on BBC2

James Rampton