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INDEX ON CENSORSHIP   |   VOL.52   |   NO.4 LEFT: Bono (middle), The Edge (far right) and the Kiss The Future crew at the 2023 Sarajevo festival Soundtrack for a siege A new film tells the little-known story of when U2 bonded with underground musicians during the siege of Sarajevo. JP O’MALLEY talks to its director NENAD CICIN-SAIN IS remembering Sarajevo in darker times. In April 1992, Serbian nationalist forces took to the city’s surrounding hills and subjected many of its 400,000 citizens to daily shelling and sniper attacks. The brutal siege of Sarajevo continued for nearly four years and 11,000 lives were lost. “I wanted to give the audience a visceral feeling of what it was like here in this city during the [Bosnian] war, when people were constantly being shelled and shot at and often had to go for long periods without food and water,” CicinSain explained from the bar of the Hotel Europe, in Sarajevo’s old town. The US-Slovenian director, whose previous films include The Time Being (2012) and Samuel David (2018), was in the Bosnian capital showcasing Kiss the Future, which opened the 29th Sarajevo Film Festival last August. The documentary demonstrates how art and music were used by local musicians during the siege as a form of resistance. Cicin-Sain has a personal interest in this story. His father is Croatian and his mother is Serbian. The director was born and raised in Ljubljana, Slovenia, when it was part of Yugoslavia. His family moved to the USA in 1980 but CicinSain briefly returned to Opatija, Croatia, in 1990 and watched Yugoslavia collapse, via war and ethnic cleansing. “I was not in Bosnia at this time but I remember hearing about people playing music in Sarajevo during the siege, and I thought it was extraordinary,” he said. Most of that live music was played in an underground club called Obala. Getting there wasn’t easy. It involved dodging sniper fire along the route. But once inside, locals had access to music, dancing, booze, fun and laughter. Bill Carter was a regular. “I didn’t know about Bill’s story until I came across Fools Rush In: A True Story of Love, War, and Redemption,” Cicin-Sain explained. The personal memoir documents Carter’s experience in war-torn Sarajevo. The free-spirited American was part of a group of expatriates who helped deliver food to bombed-out orphanages. Carter’s role in Sarajevo changed, however, after he saw an interview on MTV, in which U2’s lead singer, Bono, expressed sympathy for the Bosnians. Carter had no previous journalism experience. But with extraordinary naivety and persistence, he travelled to Verona, Italy, in July 1993 and interviewed Bono for a Bosnian TV station based in Sarajevo. U2 were in the middle of their colossal European Zoo TV Tour, which used new media as a form of political satire. Carter convinced Bono and the band to partake in several unscripted improv satellite interviews live on stage during the Zoo TV Tour. The idea was to give a voice to citizens of Sarajevo during the siege. Bono mainly asked locals how they were doing and about daily news from the war. It took a lot of effort and money. U2 had to send a satellite dish into Sarajevo and fork out roughly $125,000 to join The idea was to give a voice to citizens of Sarajevo during the siege C R E D I T: O b a l a A r t C e n t a r 16  INDEXONCENSORSHIP.ORG
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Features The conceit of Zoo T V was exposing how the 24-hour news cycle in the Western media became a form of entertainment after the First Gulf War the European Broadcasting Union, so that they could legally broadcast. “To paraphrase Bono, the conceit of Zoo TV was exposing how the 24-hour news cycle in the Western media became a form of entertainment after the First Gulf War,” said Cicin-Sain. “When U2 and Bill Carter devised this plan to do live satellite links to draw attention to the [Bosnian] war, they were taking on a lot of personal risk and jeopardy. They really didn’t know what the outcome was going to be.” In some instances, the broadcasts worked. In one clip from the documentary, a local Sarajevan man spoke to his fiancée attending U2’s concert in Stockholm. From Sarajevo he assured her he was still alive and he loved her. In another live broadcast, a local woman told Bono that the people of Sarajevo were not afraid of dying. “We are ashamed to be Europeans tonight,” Bono replied. It was beginning to look as if U2 were feeding off other people’s misery for their own entertainment, so the band decided to cut the live wartime broadcasts. They did, however, promise to play a concert in Sarajevo in the future. In September 1997, on their PopMart Tour, U2 performed to 45,000 fans at Koševo Stadium, Sarajevo. They were the first major band to hold a concert in the city after the war ended in 1995. People from different ethnicities attended. Train service was momentarily restored to allow fans to attend. “That concert was a very important cathartic moment of healing that brought many people in Sarajevo together,” said Cicin-Sain. “So I felt that had to be a central part of this documentary.” Produced by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and co-written by Cicin-Sain and Carter, Kiss the Future includes interviews with Bono, fellow U2 members The Edge and Adam Clayton, former US president Bill Clinton and British journalist Christiane Amanpour. The documentary’s director recalled how he got the band’s blessing to take part in the creative project. “Matt Damon went directly to Bono and asked him if U2 would support us in making this documentary,” Cicin-Sain explained. “U2 wanted to co-operate, but they didn’t want their presence drowning out the most important voices, which were the musicians of Sarajevo.” Researching the documentary, the director interviewed many locals about their war-time experiences. “I heard stories about women being raped and murdered in front of their children,” he explained, breaking into tears. “I did not put these things into the documentary, though, because I felt it would have made it inaccessible, but to make it authentic I felt I had to live through all of those stories,” Cicin-Sain said. Kiss the Future ends on an optimistic note. We are shown a clip from U2’s 1997 concert in the Bosnian capital. “Viva Sarajevo! Fuck the past, kiss the future!” the U2 frontman tells the crowd, who erupt into a euphoric frenzy. Reality, of course, is a little more complicated than catchy clichéd rock star slogans suggest, Cicin-Sain conceded. Forgetting the past has not been easy for Sarajevo – even today, three decades after the war ended. “But the documentary tries to show how people can use music to connect, communicate and feel human,” the director concluded. “It also ties in with my own personal philosophy that art can effect change.” JP O’Malley is a freelance journalist 52(04):16/17|DOI:10.1177/03064220231219876 RIGHT: Film director Nenad Cicin-Sain at the Sarajevo Film Festival, 2023 INDEXONCENSORSHIP.ORG   17

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INDEX ON CENSORSHIP   |   VOL.52   |   NO.4

LEFT: Bono (middle), The Edge (far right) and the Kiss The Future crew at the 2023 Sarajevo festival

Soundtrack for a siege

A new film tells the little-known story of when U2 bonded with underground musicians during the siege of Sarajevo. JP O’MALLEY talks to its director

NENAD CICIN-SAIN IS remembering Sarajevo in darker times. In April 1992, Serbian nationalist forces took to the city’s surrounding hills and subjected many of its 400,000 citizens to daily shelling and sniper attacks. The brutal siege of Sarajevo continued for nearly four years and 11,000 lives were lost.

“I wanted to give the audience a visceral feeling of what it was like here in this city during the [Bosnian] war, when people were constantly being shelled and shot at and often had to go for long periods without food and water,” CicinSain explained from the bar of the Hotel Europe, in Sarajevo’s old town.

The US-Slovenian director, whose previous films include The Time Being (2012) and Samuel David (2018), was in the Bosnian capital showcasing Kiss the Future, which opened the 29th Sarajevo Film Festival last August. The documentary demonstrates how art and music were used by local musicians during the siege as a form of resistance.

Cicin-Sain has a personal interest in this story. His father is Croatian and his mother is Serbian. The director was born and raised in Ljubljana, Slovenia, when it was part of Yugoslavia. His family moved to the USA in 1980 but CicinSain briefly returned to Opatija, Croatia, in 1990 and watched Yugoslavia collapse, via war and ethnic cleansing.

“I was not in Bosnia at this time but I remember hearing about people playing music in Sarajevo during the siege, and I thought it was extraordinary,” he said.

Most of that live music was played in an underground club called Obala. Getting there wasn’t easy. It involved dodging sniper fire along the route. But once inside, locals had access to music, dancing, booze, fun and laughter. Bill Carter was a regular.

“I didn’t know about Bill’s story until I came across Fools Rush In: A True Story of Love, War, and Redemption,” Cicin-Sain explained.

The personal memoir documents Carter’s experience in war-torn Sarajevo. The free-spirited American was part of a group of expatriates who helped deliver food to bombed-out orphanages. Carter’s role in Sarajevo changed, however, after he saw an interview on MTV, in which U2’s lead singer, Bono, expressed sympathy for the Bosnians.

Carter had no previous journalism experience. But with extraordinary naivety and persistence, he travelled to Verona, Italy, in July 1993 and interviewed Bono for a Bosnian TV station based in Sarajevo. U2 were in the middle of their colossal European Zoo TV Tour, which used new media as a form of political satire.

Carter convinced Bono and the band to partake in several unscripted improv satellite interviews live on stage during the Zoo TV Tour. The idea was to give a voice to citizens of Sarajevo during the siege. Bono mainly asked locals how they were doing and about daily news from the war.

It took a lot of effort and money. U2 had to send a satellite dish into Sarajevo and fork out roughly $125,000 to join

The idea was to give a voice to citizens of Sarajevo during the siege

C R E D I

T:

O b a l a

A r t

C e n t a r

16  INDEXONCENSORSHIP.ORG

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