Unfortunately, there has been no shortage of documentaries over the years depicting the war torn, hallowed out portions of countries due to internal conflicts or external invasions (20 Days in Mariupol comes immediately to mind). Kiss the Future (produced by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck), the new film directed by Nenad Cicin-Sain, covers the terrible period in the early ’90s when the former Yugoslavia broke into two factions (Serbia and Bosnia), and the country’s strongman leader (Slobodan Milosevic) attempted to cleanse the country of its Muslim residents.
The very cosmopolitan city of Sarajevo was a bastion of art and culture where people of different faiths and ethnicities lived side-by-side in unique harmony—often intermarrying. Milosovic, an opportunistic nationalist, hoping to create a new homogenous Yugoslavia, saw Sarajevo as a threat to all that he wanted to accomplish, and tanks rolled in and bombs fell from the sky in this once peaceful and beautiful city.
The residents there lost access to power, food, and water. Their homes were no safe harbor, and leaving them to scavenge was even more dangerous still, as the risk of being targeted by sniper fire was paramount. Kiss the Future details many of these horrors and events, but that is not the film’s primary focus.
Kiss the Future starts out broadly, explaining the facts on the ground and the politics that lead to the invasion. But what the film is more interested in is how this unique city and the people who lived and suffered there coped with the ongoing siege of Milosevic’s army for four grueling years: through art—particularly music. By firing up a generator, the industrious artistic community took their sound underground and made a basement into a club, where they could sing, drink, commiserate, and squeeze what happiness they could out of a life under siege.
Despite the continual shelling and shooting of this once peaceful city caught up in a conflict not of their making, the world (and particularly NATO) were slow to react to the tragedy going on in Sarajevo. Enter U2. The band’s frontman Bono made a comment on MTV (back when the M really meant something) about the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. This brief mention caught the eyes and ears of an American journalist named Bill Carter, who after suffering a great personal tragedy (the sudden death of his girlfriend in a car accident), poured himself into the plight of the people of Sarajevo.
Carter then began a dogged pursuit of what was then the biggest band in the world, in the hopes that they would amplify the troubles of the city. After much industrious effort, his plan worked, and while on the biggest tour of their lives (Zoo TV), the band set aside a sizable portion of time every night to interview those in the city who were struggling to survive. It was an absolutely extraordinary nightly scene to have U2 shedding light on the issues of a city that I’m sure many in their audience couldn’t find on a map without assistance, and on a conflict that seemed to paralyze sympathetic world leaders. But Kiss the Future is not about how a famous rock band saved Sarajevo. In fact, it shows the limitations of what even the most famous and motivated of celebrities can accomplish.
In the end, it wasn’t U2 that motivated the world to act, it was the execution of 8,000 Muslim men and the bombing of a market in Sarajevo (both actions ordered by Milosevic) that brought the matter to bear. In the film, you can see now President Biden giving a stemwinder of a speech from the floor of the senate, and then President Clinton speaking of the NATO bombing campaign that targeted Milosevic’s troops–an operation that finally brought the strongman to heel.
Throughout history, the sort of motivating events that move world leaders to put a halt to ethnic cleansing has to be one so undeniable that the desire to not get involved has to be overtaken by the human conscience. And sometimes not even then (see Rwanda). Had it not been for Pearl Harbor, who knows if “the Greatest Generation” would have had the opportunity to stop Hitler and earn that moniker. Sometimes, the horror has to come home before those of supposed goodwill are moved to respond.
In the case of Sarajevo, it was the escalation by Milosovic (emboldened by the inaction of the free world) that made the plight of Sarajevo impossible to ignore. All of these facts are included in Kiss the Future, and if at this point, you are thinking that the film I am describing is an impossibly grim experience, well, I can’t blame you. And I will admit, it is tough (but necessary) sledding at times. Somehow though, the film achieves a level of hopefulness that is hard to describe. When the whole world had appeared to have abandoned Sarajevo, the people of that great city refused to give up, they refused to stop living, to stop creating art. If the film is about anything, it is about the ability to access artistic expression and how that allows one to keep going, even among the most miserable of times.
There is a scene in the film of a punk rock drummer who has lost his arm due to a bombing. He is shown with electrical tape wrapped around his stump and a drum stick attached to what remains of his limb. And he is drumming his heart out. It’s hard to imagine that level of commitment and perseverance, but this film captures that spirit in unique and stirring ways. These were people who were without basic resources and surrounded by death who refused to give in. The word “remarkable” doesn’t even begin to cut it.
After Milosevic becomes so weakened that he is forced to sign a tenuous peace accord, U2 decides to make good on a promise they had made to Sarajevo. That when it was safe enough to do so (a fact still in question at the time) they would come to the city and perform.
The worn out husk of a town goes through great efforts to make the concert possible on their end. The stadium in Sarajevo had been a graveyard during the war. It would have to be returned to its original state to be suitable for a performance of that size. As the tour trucks rolled in, many people in the city could scarcely believe their eyes. As one resident said, “It wasn’t until Bono took the stage that I knew the war was over.”
During the band’s performance, an unexpected complication occurs early on: While singing ‘New Year’s Day,’ Bono blows out his voice, leaving him with nothing but a weak croak to sing with. Then, the most amazing thing happens. Bono admits that his voice is gone, and he asks the crowd to “sing for me.” And the tens of thousands in attendance do exactly that.
What should have been a crisis of performance is turned into something magical. Because what you realize is that these survivors of war aren’t just singing for a frontman without a voice, they are singing for themselves. They are singing for each other. For all that they have been through. For all that they have survived. And for the promise of a future that once seemed out of reach.
As if that isn’t compelling enough, Cicin-Sain shows the band singing the final song of the evening (‘One,’ naturally), and he does so in split screen with survivors watching the playback for the first time since the concert took place in 1997. At first they smile. Then they sing along. Then they begin to cry. Some of them break. One even doubles over.
The moment, and this film, is an uncommon mixture of memory, joy, heartache, and a testament to what these people withstood, and to all that they can’t leave behind.