In May last year, Bono and the Edge of Irish rock supergroup U2 gave a surprise impromptu performance in a Kyiv bomb shelter. For older fans, this show of solidarity with war-torn Ukraine inevitably echoed events from 30 years ago, when the band’s empathy for the besieged citizens of Sarajevo during the bloody break-up of the former Yugoslavia developed into a full-blown love affair, culminating in a 1997 stadium concert in the city. In Kiss The Future, Croatian director Nenad Cicin-Sain revisits these events with a glossy, broadly positive, occasionally fawning documentary, chronicling U2’s heartfelt but sometimes clumsy interventions in the Balkan wars.
With Ben Affleck and Matt Damon credited as producers, and guest speakers like Bill Clinton sharing their memories on screen, Kiss The Future largely plays like a slick, band-endorsed promotional project. All the same, this familiar story still feels worthy of re-telling a generation later, with an extra 30 years of post-war historical hindsight. Featuring new interviews with U2 and other key players, including Bosnia’s rich underground subculture of musicians and artists, alongside some terrific archive footage, this polished rockumentary should have pretty broad audience appeal. Unveiled at the Berlinale and Tribeca, it finds a more natural launch platform this week as the splashy opening open-air gala screening at Sarajevo Film Festival.
Kiss The Future is based on the 2016 memoir Fools Rush In by Bill Carter, an American aid worker and film-maker who was based in Sarajevo during the siege. Inspired by U2’s public statements of solidarity with Bosnia, Carter charmed and jostled his way backstage at their Verona show in July 1993, securing a short but intense Bono interview for a small news station in Bosnia. This comically awkward exchange features here, with both players adding wry commentary on their callow younger selves. As persistent and pushy as Bono himself, Carter was instrumental in keeping U2’s attention on Sarajevo, extracting a promise that they would perform there one day.
Initially, Bono mooted U2 playing a small show in the war-torn city, but the band rightly concluded it might look like a crass publicity stunt, as well as endangering lives, their own included. Instead, they enlisted Carter to host live satellite new reports from the city, which they incorporated into their 1993 Zoo TV tour, with Bono addressing citizens of the war-torn city via a giant screen onstage. These exchanges proved controversial with many critics at the time, this writer included. A negative comment piece I co-wrote for a UK music magazine about this dubious, exploitative hijacking of real-life tragedy prompted a rebuke from Bono, who sent me an axe in response. As in hatchet job. A proud career peak.
In fairness, even U2 themselves had doubts about this cheap holiday in other people’s misery. During the band’s August 1993 Wembley Stadium show in London, three young Bosnian women chastised Bono over his celebrity virtue-signalling. “You’re going to forget that we even exist,” they told him, “and we’re all going to die.” The band cancelled their Sarajevo satellite bulletins soon afterwards. To everybody’s credit, Cicin-Sain include this sobering exchange in Kiss The Future, despite the film’s generally positive line on superstar war-zone activism.
Finally, in September 1997, U2 made good on their promise by playing a rapturously received show at Sarajevo’s Koševo Stadium to around 45,000 people. The first major performance by a foreign band since the end of the war was a money-loser for U2, and Bono’s voice gave up midway through, but the archive performance footage in Kiss The Future still captures a moving and momentous event. Symbolically, the Irish rockers deliberately chose a multi-cultural bill of support acts, underscoring Sarajevo’s ethnically mixed character, which the Serbian army and their local allies had tried and failed to erase. The eyewitness accounts included here certainly recall this show as historically significant, signalling a return to a fragile kind of peaceful normality after years of conflict.
Crucially, Cicin-Sain gives full voice to citizens of Sarajevo who witnessed the concert. Rather less impressively, he mostly includes only gushing reverence towards U2’s messianic bombast, including a preposterous claim that their musical intervention helped end a war that actually concluded two years before. In fairness, only a mean-spirited grinch will be left unmoved by the glowing, humane, idealistic sentiments expressed here. But the bloody fall-out from the Soviet empire’s collapse, which triggered the Balkan wars, is still being played out today in Ukraine, which lends the end-of-history triumphalism behind this documentary a slightly hollow, bittersweet edge.
Director: Nenad Cicin-Sain
Screenwriter: Bill S. Carter
Cast: Bono, Bill Carter, The Edge, Adam Clayton, Christine Amanpour, Bill Clinton, Vesna Andree Zaimovic, Senad Zaimovic, Enes Zlatar Bure, Alma Catal Hurem
Producers: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Sarah Anthony
Editing: Eric Burton
Cinematography: Bradley Stonesifer
Music: Howard Bernstein
Production companies: Fifth Season (US), Pearl Street Films (US)
World sales: Fifth Season, Los Angeles
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (opening gala)
In English
103 minutes
