"In the Land of Blood and Honey" is a film directed by Angelina Jolie taking place in Bosnia during the war. It's about a Bosnian-Serb soldier named Danijel who is fighting for the Serb army, re-encountering Ajla, a Bosnian who is now captive in a camp he looks over. The once loving couple are now at a cross, as their motives and beliefs have changed since their situations. As a Bosnian, This film is absolutely horrible. It lacks realism in the sense that a Bosnian-Muslim woman would never fall in love with a Serbian soldier who pillaged and destroyed her way of life. The same goes vice-versa for Danijel. A Serb soldier who is full of propaganda and Serbian nationalism would never love a Bosnian-Muslim girl. If anything, he'd just see her as an object. Maybe even less. Ajla is also taken as a prisoner and stuck under supervision of Danijel. This is also a very flawed idea as Bosnian-Muslim women in those camps were stuck in tight spaces and used for rape. They were never protected by anyone especially their captors, Serb soldiers. The film captures a small stint of realism in how it portrayed the brutality of the Serbs. Such as a soldier barging in the apartment and throwing the baby off a balcony just because he could is indeed something the Serbs did to young Bosnian-Muslim children. Another accurate portrayal is when the Serb soldier bends the girl over and rapes her in front of everyone to humiliate her and get a kick out of it. These small acts of brutality is the only thing this film has done regarding historical accuracy, Anything other than that, is just BS hollywood writing. All around, "In the Land of Blood and Honey" is not a accurate, nor is it an entertaining film. I understand if the point of this was to appeal to western audiences. However, I'd rather use actual true stories from people who lived the war and use accurate information from them rather than idiotic, inaccurate Hollywood nonsense. Just because a film has a decent budget doesn't mean it's good. If there was anyone who'd ever want to know actual historical and accurate knowledge about the war in Bosnia through film, I'd strongly recommend "No Man's Land" and "Cirkus Columbia." These films are written and directed by people who have lived through the conflict and accurately portray what really happened in the country.

In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011)** 1/2 (out of 4)The Serbian Danijel (Goran Kostic) begins a relationship with the Muslim Ajla (Zana Marjanovic) just as the Bosnian War breaks out. Soon Ajla finds herself a captive to Danijel but the two slowly fall in love as the war gets bloodier.Anjelina Jolie wrote and directed this film, which has a clear message throughout. There's no doubt that Jolie had a political motivation behind the movie and she wanted her message to be heard. Many people have called IN THE LAND OF BLOOD AND HONEY an awful movie but I'm not going to go that far. In fact, I give Jolie a lot of credit for attempting to make a movie like this and especially when you consider it was the first feature she directed.There's no doubt that there are a great number of flaws to be found here and I think the biggest problem is in the screenplay. The plot of this movie is extremely light weight and I'd argue that it's way too simple and single minded for its own good. I say that because the love story here is just one-note and it's really not too hard to figure out how it's going to end. I think the film really would have benefited had Jolie punched up the film and made it a bit deeper than just these two opposites who find themselves attracted to one another.The battle sequences were certainly better handled by Jolie and she certainly wants to show the sometime graphic violence for what it is. I can't help but think that the director was influenced by SCHINDLER'S LIST and she wanted the violence to really hit people in the gut. Another problem with the film is that at just 127 minutes the film seems a lot longer due to the slow pacing as well as some subplots that really never add up to much.For the most part I thought the performances were the best thing in the picture with Marjanovic easily stealing the film as the woman who faces various forms of horror as she tries to survive her ordeal. I also liked Kostic in his role as I thought he managed to pull off the rather difficult character. With that said, IN THE LAND OF BLOOD AND HONEY isn't a complete success but it's not the bomb some people have made it out to be.

Notable as Angelina Jolie's first movie as a director (and also as the screenwriter), this movie fails in many respects.The movie mainly centers on the life of one woman in the Bosnian war as she is held captive by a soldier who alternately protects her from the severely harsh life as a prisoner and then physically abuses her and kills her kinsmen. Had the movie just focused on this story from her point of view, it may have succeeded. But the movie strays into plot lines of military strategy of the civil war, other prisoners and horrors they face, the politics of the "outside world" ignoring the on-going genocide, and more. Each of those could have also been a successful story, but when combined into a single film, we are left with a jumbled mess of a story all the while relentlessly bombarded with Ms. Jolie's message that "war is bad." Since the atrocities shown are all performed by one side, it is clear that Ms. Jolie is also lecturing us as to who she believes the bad guys are. While I do not expect a Hollywood movie to be the equivalent of a documentary, since Ms. Jolie intended to show more than just the story of the captive woman, she should have (and easily could have) included a little more balance to the political agenda.For my other movie reviews, please visit:https://nomorewastedmovienights.wordpress.com

In the 11 years of IMDb membership I've never seen reviews that so reflect how a movie's story thoroughly got under some people's skins by so disturbing their consciences. '.....Land of Blood and Honey' certainly did that.The Bosnian War ended in 1995 and the ubiquitous atrocity stories, 90% of which were authenticated as being committed by the Serbian Orthodox faction, continue to be revealed to the world. In 2011, with 15 years of thought and research behind her, Angelina Jolie made, "IN THE LAND OF BLOOD AND HONEY", her movie directorial debut and what a magnificent one it is.This movie is not for the squeamish and virtually every part of it contains the blackest nihilism and is shadowed by that adjective's meaning. But it's a great film, a masterpiece really and should be seen.The story covers a few years of time starting in the nineties, beginning with the invasion of Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Bosnian Serbs and the Serbians, greatly aided by the well armed Serbian army.'Ethnic cleansing' something the Nazi's were committed to in many areas of Europe during WWII, included the Serbian people, something the collective Serbian memory forgot about since they practiced this barbarism as a war policy against the Bosnian Muslims and Croats. (The mass *rape of Muslim women was also initiated as political policy.) The movie touches on these horrors and much more and does so within a fictional framework that seems to be documentary; the highest compliment a movie can achieve. *One estimate is that 20000 to 50000 women were brutalized.