by Brian Brooks (August 18, 2007)
Oscar-nominated "
Iraq in Fragments" director
James Longley (left)--in town with his short, "
Sari's Mother"--joined "
The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair" co-directors
Petra Epperlein and
Michael Tucker (and their daughter) following a screening of "Blair" at the
Sarajevo Film Festival Saturday afternoon--the first full day of the fest. Attending the doc, about a person wrongly imprisoned for months in Abu Ghraib prison accused of trying to assassinate Tony Blair, was quite an experience in a town that has recently known war personally. One audience member commented that when the press was present during the war in Sarajevo in the '90s, she was told as a teen to make pop culture references so the people watching would relate to them as humans and not just as "some distant people in crisis." For his part, Tucker said screening "Blair" in New York or L.A. was a "challenge because the people [there] have never experienced war."