It's astonishing how much feeling Winterbottom pours into the movie, considering the sketchiness of the characters and plot.

There's no safe zone in this movie even the hotel base for international journalists runs on emergency power and rattles with ricocheting gunfire. The director cunningly combines staged confrontations with stock news footage of the atrocity-ridden Yugoslavian civil war, and the results keep jolting viewers out of their complacency. In Welcome to Sarajevo, the Sarajevans struggle to keep living 'normally,' even though all the staples and sacraments of life, from a bread queue to a wedding, can be fatal. The newly orphaned boy carrying water caused Dizdarevic to ask, 'What's with this water that we, curiously robotic and near exhaustion, have been carrying in buckets for months?' In a similar vein, Winterbottom portrays gnarly reflexes and habits that persist in part as an ironic comment on themselves. Winterbottom has never before done such potent work he's created a fiction film about the siege of Sarajevo that bristles with the raw, unnerving textures of a battlefield documentary. He didn't want to stop even when his sister, seriously wounded, told him, 'Stop, Berin, stop, they're dead.'' The strongest sections of Michael Winterbottom's new film, Welcome to Sarajevo, have that kind of wounded, wounding poignancy.

In his 1993 book Sarajevo: A War Journal, the Bosnian journalist Zlatko Dizdarevic reported on an eleven-year-old who was waiting in line for water when snipers killed his mother and father: 'After the shooting, this boy started to fetch and pour water over the bodies of his dead parents.

Sarajevo by Zlatko Dizdarević