Director Nenad Cicin-Sain on ‘Kiss The Future’: A Film About Surviving the Siege of Sarajevo Through Music and Art (With an Assist From U2)

With Kiss The Future director Nenad Cicin-Sain has made one of the most moving films of the year, and it’s only February. In telling the story of the Siege of Sarajevo during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia in the early ‘90s, Cicin-Sain shows how the survivors of the military attack led by strongman Slobodan Milosevic kept their spirits alive through art. The level of industriousness of the citizens of Sarajevo is extraordinary, and so is this film. 

While a sizable portion of the film (produced by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) deals with the great Irish rock band U2 attempting to shed light on the tragedy at the time, and to amplify the voices of those under duress, the film is bold enough to show that fame can only move people so far. That the hard work of reaching a peaceful solution is done through perseverance, and only comes after the oppressors commit acts of such great horror that the world can no longer merely watch as bodies pile up in the streets. 

The film saves its most moving moment for last. A concert by U2 in Sarajevo (the first after the resolution to end the conflict), that is not only uplifting in the showcasing of that extraordinary event in 1997, but becomes something far more, as we watch the survivors of the siege view the concert footage in the current day. I’m not kidding when I say the last five minutes of this film will break you in half.

In our conversation, Cicin-Sain, a native of the Balkans, speaks to the courage of the survivors, the horrors of war, the parallels to current events, and the remarkable final moments of his film. 

Awards Daily: Your film sneaks up on you. The last five minutes are extraordinarily emotional.

Nenad Cicin-Sain: You’re not alone. We had a pretty extraordinary press conference in Berlin. When we premiered at the Berlinale, there was a lot of press there. They said there were three press screenings before the press conference and that they didn’t see a single dry eye in the press conferences. There were reporters saying there were people laughing and crying in a way they’ve never seen in a screening before. 

Awards Daily: I’m old enough to have been aware of what was going on at the time when the Civil War broke out in the Balkans and Yugoslavia fell apart. I think because new tragedies continue to occur, maybe this period has been a little bit forgotten. When you took this project on, did you feel like one of the great purposes of making this film was because we don’t learn the lessons of history? 

Nenad Cicin-Sain: I never really thought that the period had been forgotten as much as I think as a society we lack the imagination of how bad things can go when we become so polarized, as we are in the United States. I think that was more the catalyst: having lived, been there through part of the war and growing up there, seeing my country torn apart by a kind of falsified nationalism. It really inspired me to want to tell the story to share what can happen when we become so divided. 

Awards Daily: One of the survivors towards the end of the film was talking about the concert, and we’ll get into that a little bit more, saying that she felt we need a moment like this–referring to the concert specifically–maybe more now than we did in 1997. That is an astonishing statement for someone who survived such a thing to make. I think when we look at the world we live in now, I assume you can see parallels all over the place. 

Nenad Cicin-Sain: It became even more apparent in the process of making the film. When we had the filmfinanced and put together, when we set out to make it, we were making a film about the end of the last war in Europe, and one week before we started shooting, war in Europe broke out. I think if you had asked anybody months before, they would have thought it unimaginable that there would be war in Europe again, just beyond comprehension. That made the shoot so much more intense and visceral, because the people we were interviewing were afraid. It triggered their PTSD. We were worried going to Sarajevo at the time that war was going to spread to the region, because things were beginning to flare up again in the Balkans. So, when we took the film to Berlin and completed it, obviously the film has some tones that address what’s happening today in context to the story. Six months later, when we went to the Rome Film Festival, the Middle East flared up, and people were talking about what was happening in Israel and Gaza. So I think when she said we need that concert more today, especially if you travel a lot around the world, there’s a general tension that people feel in a lot of places where society has become very polarized through nationalistic politics that re-emerge. I think when people address the relevance of the film today, that is what they’re talking about. 

Awards Daily: There’s a point in the film where the CNN journalist, Christiane Amanpour, refers back to Milosevic, and she said I see this as the beginning of fake news. 

Nenad Cicin-Sain: What I think she’s also referring to is something that I’ve been calling weaponized tribalism, because our basic necessity in life, right after the sustenance of food and water, is that we all just want to feel loved and connected and part of a community. It’s our tribalism, it’s the core of who we are, to live within co-existent communities. And I think when people like Milosevic come out around, they weaponize that. They say that this is under threat and if you don’t support me in taking action, all these things that are the most meaningful things to you in your life will be taken from you. I think that’s something that we see being repeated over and over again. It’s just more dangerous today because of social media and how social media can amplify and aggregate that kind of weaponized tribalism. Fake news is something that has almost a brand to it. You think of certain things, conjure certain thoughts, when you hear those words, but I think when it really comes down to it, it’s weaponizing the most essential things that we feel we need in life. 

Awards Daily: That was the threat that Milosevic felt coming from Sarajevo, this incredibly cosmopolitan city where people of different faiths and ethnicities were living next to each other, even intermarrying. When you want to create a homogenous country, a space like that which is so culturally diverse and so open and welcoming to that diversity becomes the symbol of everything that you want to obliterate.

Nenad Cicin-Sain: Moralism is a threat. Anytime you have a city where different religions and ethnicities co-exist, that is a threat to a nationalist. 

Awards Daily: What you find in the film is that aside from the scramble for food and water and basic necessities, is this desire to maintain some level of normalcy, and that happens, in great part, through the arts.

Nenad Cicin-Sain: I think it’s a countermeasure to exactly what Milosevic was doing, which was to say we’re a threat. He took away their food, their water, their electricity, and he shot at them and people said you know what? Fuck you. We are still going to gather and we’re going to express ourselves and we’re going to feel human, and you can’t take that away from us. 

Awards Daily: That underground disco, to even have that footage is amazing, but the feeling of life down below when coming out of your home, or even being in your home, was so dangerous at the time. I don’t want to get too romantic, but there’s this certain power to rock and roll and the defiance of it. 

Nenad Cicin-Sain: That’s one of the things that I’m also creatively, personally, narratively always drawn to when creating a story, and this is just from personal experiences, you don’t truly know what a person is like until they’re put under horrific circumstances. There’s a great line that Bono quotes, I think it’s from a Hemingway book, it’s “Courage is grace under pressure.” That’s what emerges: finding a light in the darkness. I remember when I was talking to Matt Damon and he asked me something along the lines of after you’ve shot this and are looking at the assembly, what do you feel like the thesis is? I shared with him how moving the scene on Shawshank Redemption was when they were on the roof. They’re in this hell and they open up the beers. It was that and it was Life Is Beautiful by Roberto Benigni, you know, the stories where human beings are put under horrific circumstances and their humanity emerges. And that’s what this film is about. 

Awards Daily: You reference Bono and obviously we have to make sure we talk about U2 in relation to the film. At the time of the conflict, they’re on the biggest tour of their career–the Zoo TV tour. And they’re taking time out every night to shine a light, to interview people who are in Sarajevo, to magnify and amplify those voices. Your film is bold enough to show that even the biggest rock band in the world can only take this message so far.

Nenad Cicin-Sain: Yeah, that’s right. At a certain point, I think their intent is to create a kind of grassroots, to activate people. At their core they are activists and I think that’s from the nature of the environment of where they were raised and the period of time in Ireland in which they were raised with the issues that were happening there. That was their conditioning and their environment and it turned them into activists. And that’s what their music is. I think people forget how much their music is about social injustice and inequality and how purposeful that music can be in society. One day over Christmas, I was home, and the kids were playing, and I started reading Rolling Stone‘s top 100 artists of all time and all the top artists, from Otis Redding to Sam Cooke to Bob Marley, U2–they all were singing about social injustice. I think that has a resonance that has a purpose for us to inspire us, to activate us. 

Awards Daily: It’s that concept of pop music sort of being like a Trojan horse in a way where if you get people singing along, once they start hearing the lyrics and not just the tune, you become more conscious of what they’re talking about. Bob Dylan obviously is a great example of that as well. You move people through music.

Nenad Cicin-Sain: There’s that great statement in the film by the Edge where he says art can inspire people to make a difference, as a weapon. In my early youth, that would have seemed like kind of a theoretical cool thing to say or believe. But when you actually see it, when you actually witness that, and it’s happening again like in Ukraine…Bono and Edge went into Ukraine and sang in a subway with a soldier, who is a famous musician, who came from the front to sit and sing in the subway. Christiane Amanpour did this great episode on the ballet in Ukraine and how they’re using the ballet to do the same things as in Sarajevo and I’m absolutely sure it’s happening in Gaza and in Israel as well. I think it’s an extension of our humanity. You can choose to look at the ugly side of humanity, or you can look at the beauty. And this falls into the category of the greatness of who we can be.

Awards Daily: There’s this fantastic and unique protagonist in the film–Bill Carter, who is an American who was coming off this extraordinary personal tragedy. The thing that he said that resonated with me so much was that when he had lost the love of his life, but the love doesn’t go away, the receiver of that love does. He had to take this energy within him and put it somewhere else, and he chose to put it in a war zone to help people. It’s an extraordinary choice. 

Nenad Cicin-Sain: I think it’s probably a choice that’s made without much thought or contemplation. I think one just acts in that kind of circumstance and is looking for anything to grip onto to have purpose. I think that’s what became his purpose, which is why it’s so moving and meaningful in the film and in his life. When you look at the result of that, here’s this extraordinary thing he did, he connected U2 with the city. He found a family there. He created, he wrote a book, an extraordinary book. Out of desperation, you can choose to go to the light or the darkness. I know it sounds cheesy, but that’s what it is. He went to the darkness and in the darkness he found the light. 

Awards Daily: Bill, being an American, is entering somebody else’s tragedy, and so there is suspicion towards Bill among those who are on the wrong end of the attack. They’re like why is this guy here? He had to earn his way into their lives so that he could be a part of making things better for them. It is a thing you don’t necessarily think about, that people who are going through a hell can be suspicious of those who are, even with good intent, trying to help them. They questioned his purpose.

Nenad Cicin-Sain: I can’t remember who it was in my life that said this to me when I was young, but I lost a relationship, and it was a short-lived relationship, and they said relationships that are easily won are easily lost. The harder relationships that come through substance and sacrifice are the ones that really make a change and can have meaningful longevity in life. 

Awards Daily: The promise that U2 had made was that they at some point would come to Sarajevo and play. The footage that you have of the buses coming in and of the survivors saying he didn’t believe the war was over until he saw Bono on stage. He’s talking about being able to live in hope again.

Nenad Cicin-Sain: Yeah. For a brief moment. I think it was the mark of the end of the war, the end of the fighting. But one of the things that people don’t recognize is that usually when a war or a siege or a conflict like this happens, and this horrific injustice happens, it’s covered during the flare-up of the event. Once it ends, the cameras go away. The attention goes away and people are left with the trauma. They have to find a way to rebuild themselves. And one of the things I was thinking a lot about is that my parents were in former Yugoslavia during the war. My grandfather ended up in a concentration camp that he escaped from. So World War II and this kind of feeling of what Germany had done in World War II was ever-present in my home and in my family. I went to Berlin, to this extraordinary city of pluralism now, and thought about how the pendulum had swung from the city of fascism and oppression. It started to make me think about what Berlin was like in 1944. Can you imagine after that city was completely decimated?

Let’s just put aside the justification for the decimation, but the innocent people who were left there in the rubble. How do you deal with that trauma and that guilt and the weight and necessity for survival at that stage and rebuild? That’s something that I thought about a lot in the telling of the story. What was a really challenging thing to figure out was how do we put this concert in where U2 doesn’t seem like they came and became these heroes that saved the city, because that wasn’t the case. It just became very essential to focus on Mohammed Sacirbey, who was such an inspiration to me, the Bosnian Ambassador to the UN, who helped Bono organize the concert. It was he who said we need to invite our enemies, or those that we perceive as our enemies, to the concert if we’re going to heal, and invited Serbians and Croatians and opened the concert to the region. He had a Muslim choir open and then a local punk rock band. That’s where the film has the most value, for the message to be taken away not just about how we can get here, but once we’ve been here—which is what we’re dealing with currently in many places in the world—how do we emerge from that and begin to thrive again as a society and not repeat the mistakes that have happened before. 

Awards Daily: To your point about U2 not “saving the day,” It was only at the point after the massacre of the 8,000 Muslim men and then the bombing of the market in Sarajevo that NATO and the world and the president of the United States at the time, Clinton, were no longer willing to stand by. It had to get that horrible. There had to be this escalation that was so unacceptable before the world came forward. 

Nenad Cicin-Sain: I agree. There’s only so much a film can do and just the fact that it emotionally affects people to empathize with what happened there. I hope it’s a cautionary tale for people seeing what happened in my own country to say we shouldn’t even get there. We have to stop and put a pause now so that this doesn’t go too far. 

Awards Daily: Speaking to the concert, there’s two pieces that I thought were just remarkable. One is Bono losing his voice and he’s got not much more than a croak left, and once that happens he says to the crowd “sing for me,” which is very moving. But what had occurred to me at that moment was that while they were singing to help him, they were also singing for themselves, and for each other. 

Nenad Cicin-Sain: Metaphorically and practically, that’s exactly what happened. There’s a release that happened at that concert where people were able to feel free and one of the great expressions of freedom is being able to sing and to dance and to express yourself without judgment. 

Awards Daily: I think it actually makes the moment more magical that the frontman can barely sing. 

Nenad Cicin-Sain: I remember when I pitched the story to Matt Damon, he goes “Wait a minute. What? He lost his voice?” I go yeah. He goes “Are you fucking kidding me? You didn’t make that up?” Sometimes when you’re creating a story, you’ll find a theme that you gotta really juice so that it lands with the audience. And he is like you’re not juicing that? I’m like no, not at all, it’s what happened, it’s why it’s so special. 

Awards Daily: I referred earlier to the emotional culmination of the film at the end which is the performance of “One.” It was such a genius move to have this split screen of the survivors from that time who attended the concert, watching the footage of Bono manfully working his way through the song as best as he could and the crowd singing along, and you watch the survivors start to sing along in the current, and then they begin to break down. You had to have known that that was going to land at that moment, right? 

Nenad Cicin-Sain: I knew that it would land, but I didn’t know if people would sing along. I didn’t know that people were going to break down. Because the film is a collective memory from a lot of different points of view, I thought maybe people would sing along and it would be a collective way to experience that song. That footage didn’t exist in the world. Nobody’s seen that concert since it happened. There’s some handheld YouTube video. When people started breaking down, it was just a natural progression because of the PTSD people experienced because of the recent invasion of Ukraine. When we were doing the interviews, people were so emotional that for many days that we were filming the movie, there wasn’t a dry eye on the set. I heard horrific things that I couldn’t put in the film because they were inaccessible, but people were sharing with us things that they had shared with therapists or loved ones. So when people were breaking down watching “One,” it felt like there’s just a continuation of this way for people to be able to relive and release so many years of bottled up pain in this moment. As a filmmaker, I was looking to get reactions. I didn’t know that the reaction I would get would be one of actual release in that way.