In the Land of Blood and Honey

In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011) is a wartime drama you can watch online on iFILM — and Angelina Jolie's first film as a director, from her own screenplay. It opens just before the fighting that tore Bosnia apart in the early 1990s.

Ajla and Danijel meet in Sarajevo while the city is still whole. He's a Serb soldier; she's a Bosnian Muslim. Months later she's a prisoner in a camp he helps run, and whatever drew them together curdles into fear, dependence and one person's power over another. Zana Marjanović and Goran Kostić play it without softening either side. By the end neither of them can tell where feeling stops and survival begins.

Jolie shot the film twice, in Bosnian and in English, and cast actors from across the former Yugoslavia, many of whom lived through the war themselves. It's a hard watch, closer to a study of atrocity than a romance. Stream In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011) online on iFILM.