THE WAY IT WAS

By JAMES L. GRAFF

Chicago bureau chief James L. Graff covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia for TIME from 1991 to 1995. His reaction to the film:

When Miro and Nives, two battle-hardened Sarajevan refugees, joined me for a screening of Welcome to Sarajevo, we all expected to engage in a fair share of sarcastic rib nudging and eye rolling. How could any film capture what I felt in the summer of 1994, for instance, when I watched antiaircraft rounds pierce a tram like a sardine can, and then rushed to Kosevo Hospital to interview the wounded--including a man who had not yet realized that his wife was dying on a nearby operating table? And how much less could any movie mirror that couple's paradoxical stance vis-a-vis a city where coping went hand in hand with despair?

But no, this film rings true. The grief Sarajevo experienced during more than three years of siege was immediate and constant; any attempt to milk it for excess emotion would have missed the mark in the worst possible way, and despite its heartrending story, Welcome to Sarajevo manages not to. It captures the war's incessant rhythm, a constant call and response that made reflection a selfish luxury. "I'm all right," the main character tells his wife during a rare phone call from Sarajevo. Having said much the same in similarly inadequate calls, I know that he wasn't really. He was torn, as we all were, between being part of the agony around us and privileged outsiders to it.

The film doesn't shirk from conveying the keen sense that in the face of so much agony, an act of compassion had as random an impact in saving a life as did the mortar shells in ending so many. No one is left heartened by a false sense that good somehow triumphed in Sarajevo.