(Berlin) The tall one next to me wanted to collect Leonie’s claw. “Leonie! Leonie! he screamed inexorably. A German in his forties, a head taller than everyone else. We were in the “fan zone” in front of the Berlinale Palast. Barely two or three dozen onlookers on this cool early Sunday evening but no rain.
Posted at 6:47 p.m
I expected to find myself far behind among hordes of admirers. I was in the front row. U2’s Bono and Adam Clayton were about to walk the red carpet. A matter of minutes. Autograph hunters, a ravenous species, would have been on the lookout in Toronto or Cannes. Not in Berlin, where there were barely two or three fanatics willing to sign their War or The Joshua Tree vinyls.
The guy next to me, indifferent to the passage of the Belgian actress Cécile de France, co-star with Leonie Benesch in the TV series Abysses, decided that he had enough, since he had not managed to attract the attention of the young actress German. He only had it for Leonie. I almost asked him, “While you’ve been waiting, aren’t you staying for Bono?” “I held back. The U2 singer must interest him the same way his music has interested me for 30 years, so zero.
I immediately recognized the auburn, 60-year-old man with pink glasses making a peace sign with his fingers.
I had heard the song One half an hour earlier on my way to the Berlinale-Palast, just by chance passing the famous Hansa-Studios, where U2 had recorded their album Warning Baby in 1990, a stone’s throw from Potsdamer Platz.
This famous song, inspired by tensions within the group and the reunification of Germany, is at the heart of Kiss the Future by American filmmaker Nenad Cicin-Sain, who presented his first documentary at the Berlinale on Sunday.
In 1997, U2 performed an anthology concert on a vacant lot in Sarajevo that had been a makeshift cemetery a few days earlier, near the rubble where snipers had targeted the local population for 1,425 consecutive days. However, Bono Vox had lost his voice. The audience took over and sang One in unison.
An audience of all cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds, Bosnian Muslims and Jews, Serbian Orthodox, Croatian Catholics, who were able to gather in Sarajevo for the first time in more than four years of armed conflict. In a besieged city where about 14,000 citizens perished under the bullets.
Moved, with tears in their eyes, those who were there look at these images in the film by Nenad Cicin-Sain. And this communion, the connecting power of music, after so much grief and suffering, can only touch you as a spectator. “Fuck the past. kiss the future Bono sang to the Sarajevo crowd. “When he said that, the war was finally over for me,” said one of the viewers.
Let there be no mistake. While Kiss the Future is interested in an armed invasion, unlike Sean Penn’s Superpower, which was also presented at the Berlinale this weekend, it is not a documentary glorifying an international superstar. Bono, who can be ponderous in his messianic attitude as a messenger of peace, plays a more subdued supporting role in this film about the resistance of Sarajevo’s artists.
It’s mostly about her. Cicin-Sain, who is of Slovenian origin, wanted to tell the story of the unlikely encounter between the then most important rock group U2, who composed the song Miss Sarajevo about a subversive beauty pageant in which the contestants carried a banner on which was wrote the phrase: ” Let’s not kill them” and the artists of Sarajevo’s (literally) underground scene.
While snipers fire at everything that moves on the streets, punk rock and theater groups play in the basements of the besieged city, risking their lives. “It was therapy for us,” says the lead singer of a band whose drummer lost an arm (he had a stick attached to it with electrical tape) and a technician lost his life.
Nenad Cicin-Sain conducted interviews with Bosnian artists and journalists, American and British aid workers, and CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour, who was there 30 years ago. It commemorates the motivations of Serbian genocide Slobodan Milosevic in the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre (8,000 Bosnian Muslims executed by his army). Former US President Bill Clinton, whom many, including Amanpour, criticized for his inactivity at the time, is also interviewed.
However, the film focuses on the young artists and intellectuals who kept the soul of Sarajevo alive during those dark years. “We who survived the siege suffer from post-traumatic stress. That’s why we generally refuse to talk about it with our children. It’s very demanding. But it was worth it for this film,” Vesna Zaimovic, a journalist taking part in the documentary, said at a news conference on Sunday.
PHOTO FABRIZIO BENSCH, Portal
Producer Matt Damon, musicians Adam Clayton and Bono and screenwriter Bill S. Carter at the premiere in Berlin
Cicin-Sain was inspired by the book by photographer and videographer Bill S. Carter, who wrote the screenplay for the documentary produced by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. It was Carter who invited U2 to perform in Sarajevo for the first time. He was also the one who convinced U2 to satellite interviews he conducted with harried residents of his adopted hometown during the ZooTV tour.
“We stopped because we felt we were taking advantage of the misery of those under siege,” says Bono. When you hear a Bosnian criticize the westerners for not doing anything for Sarajevo, you wonder if things haven’t gotten too dark for the concert tour.
We too, given the previously unreleased images of the famous Sarajevo concert, believe that Bono and his band have caught up well. It was indeed much more than a simple concert. The powerful symbol of a fragile peace.