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BERLINALE 2023 Berlinale Special

Nenad Cicin-Sain and Bill Carter • Director and screenwriter of Kiss the Future

Life Is Beautiful became a theme and a creative inspiration for both of us – putting the best of humanity next to the worst of it”

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- BERLINALE 2023: The creative duo discuss their documentary about people trying to survive in a besieged Sarajevo and the music that helped them do so

Nenad Cicin-Sain and Bill Carter  • Director and screenwriter of Kiss the Future
Bill Carter (left) and Nenad Cicin-Sain (© Cineuropa/fadege.it)

Cineuropa sat down with Nenad Cicin-Sain and Bill Carter, the creative duo behind Kiss the Future [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Nenad Cicin-Sain and Bill C…
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]
, a Berlinale-screened documentary about people trying to survive in a besieged Sarajevo during the Bosnian War and the music that helped them do so. They also discuss the ethics of helping people during a humanitarian crisis.

Cineuropa: There are many different voices and perspectives in your film. You talked to siege survivors, musicians and politicians, and you also added archive footage.
Nenad Cicin-Sain: I am from that region, I was there through that part of the war, and I wanted to tell the story from the point of view of the Bosnians, even though I am not from Bosnia. I knew about the U2 concert, and I thought about [using this film to] celebrate humanity and the difficulties that people went through, so that [the audience] could understand what happened there. Bill and I started working on it – there was his extraordinary story, and then there was the difficult process of getting U2 involved. They trusted Bill and Matt [Damon], but they were cautious – they wanted the film to be about the Bosnians, not about them. If I’d wanted to make a concert movie about U2, they wouldn’t have done it.

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We started working with Bill, and Life Is Beautiful by Roberto Benigni became a theme for both of us, and a source of creative inspiration – putting the best of humanity next to the worst of it. Our goal was to show with as much clarity as possible what this moment in history was like, through many different points of view, and that became a narrative structure for the script that Bill had written.

Bill Carter: Another important thing for us was that we didn’t want to overexplain things at any moment. We wanted the viewer to find their way through [the story].

What was it like for you to go back to that period in your life?
BC:
It’s always difficult to do that for any of us. They’re friends of mine, so I had to explain our intentions, and once they trusted us, they did it. They were open, but it wasn’t easy for them to talk about those times. What was important was that Nenad has this unique position of being from the region but not having lived through that. So he could ask them questions in a way that was very “innocent”. I knew of a few little details he could ask a particular person, but then again, it had to be asked by someone who could get those details out.

Is it easier or harder nowadays to bring attention to a cause?
NC-S: It’s more difficult. Bill wasn’t a journalist, and he forged documentation in order to do an interview with the biggest rock star in the world. After we’d finished the film, [war correspondent] Christiane Amanpour told me: “Listen, not many people did anything. But if you did something, if your intent was to help, and if you put yourself on the line to go and do something, how can you judge that?” I think it’s a painful thing that we are judged for wanting to help. And it’s a sad state of affairs when this kind of intent now passes through this lens of, “Oh, this was about you, not about them.”

It’s an important ethical issue to distinguish people who really wanted to help from “war tourists”, as you call them in the film.
BC:
We [included] that on purpose. Because [Bosnians] were very careful about who they were letting in – some people would come for two weeks and then leave.

They didn’t take responsibility for their actions or for the people they said they wanted to help.
B
C: There is a saying in Southern Africa, when two people meet each other. One person says: “I see you,” and the other person says: “I am here.” Sometimes, when you go to a place like Sarajevo during the war, people there want to be seen and to be heard. When you look and listen, then you can actually hear what they might be in need of.

NC-S: And you can try to help.

BC: You need to take more time with them, which is painful.

NC-S (to Bill): Let me ask you a question: now, knowing in hindsight everything that transpired, would the grown-up version of you have done what you did, the way that you did it, or would you have done anything differently?

BC: I don’t think so. I might not have gone, because I have kids. That is the main barrier to going anywhere. But I wouldn’t have done anything differently, because that is the way I’m constructed.

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