People watch films to escape their own reality or to discover someone else's. With the pace and density of a major film festival like Berlin's, both ends of the spectrum can be emotionally taxing.

Angelina Jolie is more often associated with films that let audiences take a step back from reality. Think Lara Croft. But the actress who has been frequently dubbed the most beautiful woman in the world intentionally broke out of her own mold to take on a new role: that of writer, director - and human rights activist.

How grey are black and white?

"In the Land of Blood and Honey," which premiered in New York in late December and is a major attraction at this year's Berlin Film Festival, is a fictional account of an ambiguous relationship between a Bosnian woman and a Serbian soldier during the war that wracked the region in the mid-1990s.

Jolie doesn't shy away from sincerely realistic, nearly detached depictions of brutality, and her film adds a dozen rapes to the running count above. The love story couldn't be further from a romance a la Hollywood, but is a picture of how war can change a person's heart and confuse something as essential to the human existence as love.


For anyone who has been spared the experience of an ethnic conflict - whether in the Balkans during the 1990s, in Rwanda, Sudan, Chechnya, or elsewhere - the film offers a hefty dose of the reality.

But for many Serbs, as I learned at the festival, the film reveals just a fraction of the real story.

Serbian journalist Zorica Markovic, who herself had a differentiated view of the film, explained to me how her countrymen see it. It was a civil war with three sides, she said - Croatians, Bosnian Muslims and Serbs - whereas Jolie basically showed the Muslims as the victims and the Serbs as war criminals.

"It is a very complicated topic, and she banalized it, so everyone here is hurt. We don't look at ourselves as bad guys," Markovic said.

Jolie, however, said over the weekend in Berlin that if her debut work points a finger at anyone, then at the international community, which - as in other major ethnic conflicts - took years to get involved.

The pull of lawless machos

Bollywood's recent creation, "Don - the King is Back," is a massive dose of the other need for cinema: utter distraction via attractive people, a hero who blurs the line between good and criminal, and the bloodless deaths of dozens of malicious henchmen.

Pure, kitsch-oozing action, with a dollop of song and dance on top.

Don is not real. If he were, he already would have died a thousand gruesome deaths or - more likely - be wallowing away somewhere in an Indian prison. But the people who eagerly await his return in this sequel are real. Even the aesthetics of something as intentionally anti-intellectual as "Don," including the funky mishmash of Hindi and English dialogue, offer a glimpse of a culture that shares the international fascination with law-straddling machos.


No costume blood

A documentary, like Sean McAllister's "The Reluctant Revolutionary," should come closest to reality. Indeed, the blood in the account of the Yemeni uprising last year was not just representative of blood from the 90s, as in Jolie's film, it was real blood.

The UK director followed a Yemeni tourist guide, the ironic and reflective Kais, as the revolution against President Ali Abdullah Saleh unfolded early last year. It is the reality of a young man whose pregnant wife is threatening to leave and who can't feed his other two children because political strife is driving away foreign tourists - his customers. A man who stuffs his left cheek with khat leaves to escape the stress.

When 45 protestors were shot dead on March 18, 2011, Kais was in medic tents with cameraman McAllister - the last foreigner in the country - in tow. The pair were also present at the world premiere in Berlin, where Kais received a hero's applause, a sort of guilty debt paid by those who have never been shot at.

Filmed entirely with a hand-held camera, watching "The Reluctant Revolutionary" is like riding the rickety old roller coaster at the county fair, though the story of injustice and violence is far more nauseating. It's a reality that doesn't go away when you leave the theater.

After a handful of screenings, my head is full of a thousand images. In a way, it's a relief to get back to my life, which isn't that boring after all, except that it no longer seems quite as real.

Author: Kate Bowen, Berlin
Editor: Greg Wiser