Kiss the Future: Bono Gets the Compensatory Noble Peace Prize

MOVIE INFO:

KISS THE FUTURE, directed by Nenad Cicin-Sain, story by Bill Carter and Cicin-Sain, screenplay by Carter, based on his memoir: “Fools Rush In,” is the story of defiance amid the 1990s siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. The film focuses on a vibrant underground community who used music and art to effect change and garner global attention by ultimately inspiring an American aid worker to reach out to the world’s biggest band U2 to help raise awareness of the devastating conflict. KISS THE FUTURE follows the band’s promise to perform a post-war concert that saw U2 play to over 45,000 local fans in a liberated city, a show that lives on as a joyous collective memory for the people of Sarajevo.

REVIEW:

Kiss the Future is part Documentary of the Bosnian war, part U2 behind the scenes featurette, and lastly, a U2 peace concert. The band had been setting it up for years. Their 90’s Zoo TV Tour featured Sarajeveans via satellite beamed into giant screens. It was a political stunt coordinated between the band and MTV that became a serious desire to play in that war torn space after the conflict had winded down.

The setup, is a documentary that explains the history of the war through the emotional testimonies of its citizens. The snippets of interviews combined with archival footage show their daily life, largely relayed through prominent cultural figures – the evading of snipers, building structures made from shipping containers as walkways to obstruct the sniper’s view, the underground art and music scene that thrived and was a counterprotest to the war’s absurdity, even a defiantly held Miss Sarajevo beauty contest. Sure, you’ll have to put up with the bits that showed the influence of U2 on their thinking and music, bits of Bono patting himself on the back for his political acumen and cultural sensitivity. The resilience of Sarajeveans is evident. So too, the insult that the war, with its ethnic cleansing, was to the city’s millenniums old multicultural identity.

It’s all a clever stunt, but an emotional one that draws you into the cause. And it works. Bill S. Carter, who is credited with the screenplay, and who was the main organizer for the U2 Sarajevo concert, gets prominent placement as both an aid worker and as a kind of Bono whispherer. He along with Bono duly burnish their saintly credentials. Others in the Carter circle of entitled aura get their camera moments- the chance to relay, rant and eventually shed a tear.

The concert extracts that close Kiss the Future are treated as a grand celebration of Sarajevo’s reemerging multicultural, peaceful coexistence identity. Kiss the Future is both a Bono peace mission and the shining example for all future cities. When Bono’s voice breaks in the middle of the concert and the attendees pull him through to the end, it’s hard not to see that vision as right and true.