Scream for me Sarajevo: 'A story beautifully told'

EBBE COMMS

Scream for Me Sarajevo, a film by Bosnian author Tarik Hadzic, following the story about the concert of a global rock star Bruce Dickinson in besieged Sarajevo, has gained the sympathy of audience abroad.

The UK-based Kerrang! magazine, devoted to rock music, wrote a review on the film, saying it was “the story of Bruce Dickinson's Bosnia gig, beautifully told.”

This is not a movie about Bruce Dickinson or his band, but about his fans who risked their lives in the besieged Sarajevo to be there at his concert, reads the review of the film that follows the arrival of the Iron Maiden's frontmen in Sarajevo in 1994, where he held a concert amid the war horrors.

Kerrang!'s Nick Ruskell said in his review that the film was about the “search for hope, dignity and humanity, of being able to have and enjoy something normal that people elsewhere take for granted.”

The film also follows a former UN officer Travor Gibson, who was a member of the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia during the 1990s and who assisted the organizing of the concert. He earlier told N1 that the film sparkled incredible reactions. According to him, the story has come at a good moment.

“I was always telling people that Sarajevo is not what they see in the news,” he added.

Kerrang!'s review pointed out that the footage of the Dickinson's concert might be grainy but it captured a room “exploding with cathartic joy in the face of the worst kind of adversity; genuinely seizing the day when tomorrow could easily be your last.”

Dickinson and his band members returned to Bosnia two decades later to meet the people who were there that night and, as Kerrang!'s author put it, no division between performer and fan was felt.

“The story told here is a heartbreakingly sad one, but this is also a life-affirming document of the human spirit, and how even in the darkest times a bit of hope is a truly powerful thing,” concluded the review.