“Kiss the future!” rock star Bono of band U2 shouted at the crowd during the historic concert in Sarajevo in 1997. The city was then emerging from siege and war. It was time, the Irishman was telling them, to look forward after the years of horror.
Now, the story behind the concert, and how it happened, is told in Kiss The Future, the feature documentary opening the 29th Sarajevo FF. The film, which world-premiered earlier this year at Berlinale, is directed by Nenad Cicin-Sain with a screenplay by Bill S Carter, the former aid worker who wrote about his experiences in Sarajevo during the siege in his book ‘Fools Rush In.’
Carter was the one who, through his persistence and ingenuity, had persuaded U2 to come to Sarajevo.
“Bill had this experience back then which I wasn’t aware of. I was born in the former Yugoslavia, with a Serbian mother, a Croatian father, an Albanian wife,” director Cicin-Sain explains why this material has such resonance for him. Although he grew up in the US, he had been in the region when the war was happening and still remembers his complete disbelief that such a conflict could break out.
“I knew about the concert [in Sarajevo] and I knew about people using music and art as a form of resistance. It’s happening in Ukraine now as well,” the director notes. He was keen to make a documentary about the war, the music and the experiences of those stuck in Sarajevo during the siege, but he wanted it to be accessible and relevant to as wide an audience as possible.
At the time he started working on Kiss The Future, Cicin-Sain had just finished writing a screenplay for actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. He discovered that Damon knew Bono. By then, he had also come across Carter’s book. “I was so impressed by it. I thought this is the connective tissue to connect all these ideas.”
Cicin-Sain called Carter and they soon agreed to work together. “There was a melding of minds about what this should be about. Simultaneously, as Bill and I started working together, Matt and Ben Affleck came in [as producers]. Then Matt and Bill went to Bono.”
U2 had access to archive footage of the concert which was very precious to the band but which hadn’t been seen in years, and hadn’t even been digitised.
“I am coming at this from a lived experience whereas Nenad is coming at it from an observer [point of view] but also a deep interest to understand more of it,” writer Carter says of their different backgrounds and approaches.
One crucial question was how to tell the story from the point of view of the “people who were there” (as Cicin-Sain puts it) while also including the perspective of rock star outsiders like the U2 band members.
Beyond the band members, the film has a rich mix of contributors, everybody from CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour to former US President Bill Clinton, as well as many of the key figures from the rock and punk scene in Sarajevo during the siege. The musicians remember their defiant philosophy. If you’re told you may only have a short time to live, what do you do? “You do what you love the most,” one explains why they kept on playing their screeching guitars even as the war raged around them.
“There is this tapestry of people with a collective memory,” Cicin-Sain says of the different threads he tried to weave together in the film.
The director knew that “audiences want U2…they don’t care before they see the movie about the musicians on the ground.” His challenge was to use their interest in Bono and the band to draw them into the movie and to “expose them to something new.”
With Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Bono promoting the film, Kiss The Future has a far wider exposure than most other docs looking back on the Balkan wars.
The filmmakers are leaving the deal-making and distribution strategy to the experts. “The only thing we have agreed on, and that is most essential, is that the film screens in Sarajevo for the Bosnians. I also want to take it to Belgrade. I want to take it to Zagreb and I want to take it to Kosovo,” Cicin-Sain told BDE.
The director acknowledges that he was dealing with some powerful personalities with strong artistic visions in making Kiss The Future. However, he insists that producers Damon and Affleck were never interfering or overbearing. Instead, they were “protective” and tried always to bring the best out of him.
“With Matt [Damon], he would ask how are you feeling, how can I help you? I would say what do you think of this idea and how does it land on you? And he’d be, like, this works.”
Bono and U2, meanwhile, insisted throughout that they shouldn’t be treated as the “heroes” of the story. They told Cicin-Sain that they saw themselves as “being part of a moment of history in Sarajevo” but that they “didn’t come in and do anything for the people of Sarajevo. They did things for us.”
The band also made it very clear they weren’t interested in yet another concert movie about them. There had been plenty of those already. Cicin-Sain had to convince them that “this isn’t about you guys. It’s about the Sarajevans. It’s through your coming to Sarajevo that you were able to bring their story to the world.”
In Berlin, the U2 band members were initially reluctant about going on stage at the premiere of the documentary. They were still worried about stealing the limelight.
In Sarajevo today, Carter believes, Bono and U2 are regarded with real respect.
“They’re perceived, I don’t think as heroes…they’re perceived as genuine people who cared about them…they [the people of Sarajevo] see them [the band members] as these amazing people who heard them and connected with them in a very personal way,” the writer reflects. “It’s a very common thing that celebrities can think about you for one month or one year and then it goes away…but it’s 30 years since we started our journey together and it [Sarajevo] is still on their [the band’s] minds.”
This article has been updated since its first publication at Berlinale 2023.
