Rape-Scene Row Forces Jolie Out of Bosnia

A film production involving inter-ethnic love and a rumored rape scene sparked so much controversy in Bosnia that novice director Angelina Jolie has been forced to abandon shooting there. Bosnian rape victims protested that Jolie's movie aimed to depict a "loving surrender" by women to Serbian rapists who used the gang attacks during the 1992 war to "denationalize" and dehumanize victims, said an open letter to the media from a victims organization. Producers deny the film involves rape, and say it instead focuses on an inter-ethnic couple separated by war, with the Bosnian Muslim woman ending up in a detention camp, where her Serbian boyfriend works as a guard, reports the Telegraph.

Jolie has moved primary filming to Hungary in the wake of the protests. "There has been a great deal of misinformation in the media about my current film project," Jolie wrote in response to the victims. "I am deeply sensitive to the suffering experienced by members of your associations and I would never trivialize what they went through." Jolie offered to meet with victims to gain a "greater understanding of the suffering and abuses by the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina." Officials estimate that some 20,000 women, mostly Muslim, were sexually assaulted during the war.