The Truth Sometimes Hurts A lot

Rating: 8/10 (23 March 2014)

In the 11 years of IMDb membership I've never seen reviews that so reflect how a movie's story thoroughly got under some people's skins by so disturbing their consciences. '.....Land of Blood and Honey' certainly did that.
The Bosnian War ended in 1995 and the ubiquitous atrocity stories, 90% of which were authenticated as being committed by the Serbian Orthodox faction, continue to be revealed to the world.
In 2011, with 15 years of thought and research behind her, Angelina Jolie made, "IN THE LAND OF BLOOD AND HONEY", her movie directorial debut and what a magnificent one it is.
This movie is not for the squeamish and virtually every part of it contains the blackest nihilism and is shadowed by that adjective's meaning. But it's a great film, a masterpiece really and should be seen.
The story covers a few years of time starting in the nineties, beginning with the invasion of Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Bosnian Serbs and the Serbians, greatly aided by the well armed Serbian army.
'Ethnic cleansing' something the Nazi's were committed to in many areas of Europe during WWII, included the Serbian people, something the collective Serbian memory forgot about since they practiced this barbarism as a war policy against the Bosnian Muslims and Croats. (The mass *rape of Muslim women was also initiated as political policy.) The movie touches on these horrors and much more and does so within a fictional framework that seems to be documentary; the highest compliment a movie can achieve.
*One estimate is that 20000 to 50000 women were brutalized.