Historical Maritime combat

From Michael Winterbottom the director of Jude there is Welcome to Sarajevo which is in competition and hotly

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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.