Bill Carter | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 1966 |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Editor, Miss Sarajevo |
| Website | billcarter |
Bill Carter (born 1966) is a writer and director. He directed the documentary film Miss Sarajevo , which consists of amateur video material he shot during his stay in Sarajevo while the city was under siege. He is the author of Fools Rush In, his memoirs of working for an aid agency during the Bosnian War. He teaches journalism and film at Northern Arizona University.
Carter became involved in the Balkan conflict when he was traveling the world after his girlfriend died in a car crash in 1991. After traveling to Split, he joined The Serious Road Trip, a humanitarian aid organization distributing food and medicine to places the United Nations and the Red Cross would not go. Arriving in Sarajevo, he decided to stay with the Sarajevans, inspired by the way they tried to maintain the life they had before the siege began. He saw Sarajevo as key because Sarajevans refused to be divided along ethnic lines with many Serbs joining the defence of the city against the Serb nationalist besiegers. [1]
Carter began to do some work for the Sarajevan television, and he managed to get an interview with Bono from rock group U2. Bono, who later admitted that he was deeply touched by Bill Carter's story, heard about the importance of pop music in Sarajevo and said that he would love to play in Sarajevo. Carter quickly concluded that this was too dangerous—not least because the large gathering of fans that would assemble might be shelled by the besieging Serb nationalists. [2] Instead, Carter came up with another way of connecting rock music with Sarajevans; instead of "bringing U2 to Sarajevo" he would "bring Sarajevo to U2", by means of satellite linkups to U2's Zoo TV Tour concerts, giving the people of Sarajevo a chance to tell their story to the world.
In 1995, Carter made the documentary film Miss Sarajevo out of the video material he recorded. Bono insisted that he would call the film Miss Sarajevo, after the beauty contest Sarajevans organized during the siege, and wrote a song by the same title as soundtrack to the film. Miss Sarajevo won the International Monitor Award, the Golden Hugo Award and the Maverick Director Award, Newport Beach Film Festival.
In 1997, when U2 finally performed in Sarajevo during their PopMart Tour, Carter was in the audience, meeting with the friends he had made during the siege. [3] Carter wrote an acclaimed memoir about these experiences titled Fools Rush In that was shortlisted for a BBC book club upon first publication [4] and received critical praise from Bono, Jon Krakauer, Jim Harrison and Charles Bowden among others.
On April 6, 2009, Carter was awarded honorary citizenship by the city of Sarajevo, the highest civilian award possible for those that helped the city during the siege of Sarajevo in the Bosnian War. [5]
Carter's second book, Red Summer, tells the story of his time as a commercial salmon fisherman in a remote Alaskan village over a four-year span. Both books were shortlisted by Nancy Pearl as among her top "armchair travel books."
Bill Carter's newest book, Boom, Bust, Boom: A Story About Copper, The Metal That Runs The World won the Arizona/New Mexico Book Award for nonfiction in 2013. [6] "Boom, Bust, Boom" is an account of the all-pervasive presence of copper in our lives and its cost on our health, economy, and our environment - with a beautifully interwoven personal discovery that begins after Carter is poisoned by the vegetables grown in his family garden. The book goes from Arizona to Indonesia to Bristol Bay, Alaska and back again and has received high marks from renowned authors including Sebastian Junger, Luis Alberto Urrea, Jim Harrison and more.
Sarajevo is the capital and largest city of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a population of 275,524 in its administrative limits. The Sarajevo metropolitan area including Sarajevo Canton, East Sarajevo and nearby municipalities is home to 555,210 inhabitants. Located within the greater Sarajevo valley of Bosnia, it is surrounded by the Dinaric Alps and situated along the Miljacka River in the heart of the Balkans, a region of Southern Europe.
The siege of Sarajevo was a prolonged blockade of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, during the Bosnian War. After it was initially besieged by the forces of the Yugoslav People's Army, the city was then besieged by the Army of Republika Srpska. Lasting from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996, it was three times longer than the Battle of Stalingrad, more than a year longer than the siege of Leningrad, and was the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
Emir Kusturica is a Serbian film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and musician. He also has French citizenship. Kusturica is one of the most-distinguished European filmmakers beginning in the mid-1980s, best known for surreal and naturalistic movies that express deep sympathies for people from the margins. He has also been recognized for his projects in town-building. He has competed at the Cannes Film Festival on five occasions and won the Palme d'Or twice, as well as the Best Director prize for Time of the Gypsies.
Miljenko Jergović is a prominent Bosnian writer.
The Bosnian War was an international armed conflict that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. The war is commonly seen as having started on 6 April 1992, following a number of earlier violent incidents. The war ended on 14 December 1995 when the Dayton accords were signed. The main belligerents were the forces of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, those of Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia and Republika Srpska, proto-states led and supplied by Croatia and Serbia, respectively.
Original Soundtracks 1 is a studio album recorded by rock band U2 and Brian Eno under the pseudonym Passengers as a side project. Released on 6 November 1995, the album is a collection of songs written for mostly imaginary films. Owing to Eno's involvement as a full songwriting partner and the album's experimental nature, the moniker "Passengers" was chosen to distinguish it from U2's conventional albums. It was commercially unnoticed by the band's standards and received generally mixed reviews. Guest musicians on the record included Italian opera singer Luciano Pavarotti and producer Howie B, who would co-produce U2's following album, Pop (1997).
Branko Đurić, also known by his nickname Đuro, is a Bosnian actor, comedian, film director and musician, who lives and works in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
"Miss Sarajevo" is a song by Irish rock band U2 and British musician Brian Eno, credited to the pseudonym "Passengers". It was released on 20 November 1995 as the only single from their album Original Soundtracks 1. Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti makes a vocal appearance, singing the opera solo. The song was written about a group of women who held a beauty pageant during the Siege of Sarajevo as an act of defiance.
The Zoo TV Tour was a worldwide concert tour by rock band U2. Staged in support of their 1991 album Achtung Baby, the tour visited arenas and stadiums from 1992 to 1993. It was intended to mirror the group's new musical direction on Achtung Baby. In contrast to U2's austere stage setups from previous tours, the Zoo TV Tour was an elaborately staged multimedia spectacle, satirising television and media oversaturation by attempting to instill "sensory overload" in its audience. To escape their reputation for being earnest and over-serious, U2 embraced a more lighthearted and self-deprecating image on tour. Zoo TV and Achtung Baby were central to the group's 1990s reinvention.
"Sniper Alley" was the informal name primarily for streets such as Ulica Zmaja od Bosne and Meša Selimović Boulevard, the main boulevard in Sarajevo which during the Bosnian War was lined with Serbian snipers' posts, and became infamous as a dangerous place for civilians to traverse. The road connects the industrial part of the city to the Old Town's cultural and historic sites. The boulevard itself has many high-rise buildings giving sniper shooters extensive fields of fire.
Romeo and Juliet in Sarajevo was an international documentary about the deaths of Admira Ismić and Boško Brkić. The couple were natives of Bosnia and Herzegovina living in the city of Sarajevo. She was a Bosniak, and he a Bosnian Serb. They were killed by sniper fire on 19 May 1993, while trying to cross the Vrbanja bridge to the Serb-controlled territory of Grbavica. Mark H. Milstein's photograph of their dead bodies was used by numerous media outlets, and a Reuters dispatch about them was filed by Kurt Schork. The documentary was co-produced by PBS's Frontline, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the National Film Board of Canada and WDR Germany. It was directed by John Zaritsky.
Welcome to Sarajevo is a 1997 war drama film directed by Michael Winterbottom, written by Frank Cottrell Boyce and is based on the book Natasha's Story by Michael Nicholson. The film stars Stephen Dillane, Woody Harrelson, Marisa Tomei, Emira Nušević, Kerry Fox, Goran Višnjić, James Nesbitt, and Emily Lloyd.
Grbavica is a 2006 film by Jasmila Žbanić about the life of a single mother in contemporary Sarajevo in the aftermath of systematic rapes of Bosniak women by Serbian soldiers during the Bosnian War. It was released in the United Kingdom as Esma's Secret: Grbavica, and in US as Grbavica: Land of My Dreams.
Remake is a 2003 Bosnian war film directed by Dino Mustafić, and produced by Enes Cviko and Martine de Clermont-Tonnerre. The film is a Turkish-French co-production.
Jusuf "Juka" Prazina was a Bosnian soldier during the Bosnian War.
Haris Pašović is a Bosnian theatre director. Over the course of his career, he has also worked as a playwright, producer, choreographer, performer, and designer. He is best known for his productions of Wedekind's “Spring Awakening”. He is the artistic leader of the East West Theatre Company in Sarajevo and tenured Professor of Directing at the Academy of Performing Arts in Sarajevo.
Inela Nogić became world-famous during the Siege of Sarajevo when she won the 1993 Miss Besieged Sarajevo, which was held in a basement in an effort to avoid the barrage of sniper attacks from Serb militias. Nogić and the other contestants held up a banner that read "Don't let them kill us". The pageant was documented by an amateur filmmaker, whose footage director Bill Carter then used in his documentary Miss Sarajevo. The documentary was broadcast internationally, provoking a viewer response that added to the international pressure to end the siege. Footage of the documentary was incorporated into the single "Miss Sarajevo" by the Irish band U2 together with Brian Eno and the Italian opera singer Luciano Pavarotti. Nogić's picture was also featured on the cover of the single, taken during the pageant. Nogić was 17 years old at the time.
"Slug" is a song by Passengers, a side project of rock band U2 and musician Brian Eno. It is the second track on Passengers' only release, the 1995 album Original Soundtracks 1. The track was originally titled "Seibu" and was almost left off the album before it was rediscovered later during the recording sessions. Though Eno made most of the creative decisions during the recording sessions, "Slug" was one of the few tracks that the members from U2 tried to craft themselves.
On 23 September 1997, Irish rock band U2 performed at Koševo Stadium in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, as part of the group's PopMart Tour. They were the first major artist to hold a concert in the city after the end of the Bosnian War in 1995. Approximately 45,000 fans attended the show.
Trg oslobođenja - Alija Izetbegović is a square in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. It lies between the municipalities Stari Grad and Centar. It links the main pedestrian thoroughfare of the Sarajevo old town, Ferhadija street, with Zelenih Beretki street, with the Dom Armije (1881). On its east side it hosts the Orthodox Cathedral (1874) and the University of Sarajevo School of Economics and Business. On its west is the Svjetlost building, while at its south, beyond Zelenih Beretki, stands the Dom Armije (1881)
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
