Post date: February 24, 2003 — 9:30 a.m.
On Wed., Feb. 26, Bosnian writer and director Danis Tanovic will speak at the Harvard Film Archive about his award-winning movie “No Man’s Land” depicting the reality of the Bosnian war. The event is part of the Harvard Law School Program on Negotiation’s conflict resolution film series. After a screening of the film, Tanovic and Harvard Law School Professor Robert Mnookin will lead a discussion about the film and international conflict resolution as it relates to the Balkans. This event, which is free and open to the public, will begin at 7 p.m.
Tanovic became a celebrity in the international film community practically overnight with the release of “No Man’s Land” in 2001. Born in 1969 in the former Yugoslavia, Tanovic developed an interest in filmmaking after spending several years studying music and engineering. He was attending the Sarajevo Film Academy in 1992 when the war broke out. Over the next two years, Tanovic shot hundreds of hours of documentary footage of the war and its effect on the nation before leaving Sarajevo to study filmmaking in Belgium. While in Belgium, Tanovic produced a documentary about the Bosnian conflict, “A Year After,” and several short films; he also wrote a play, “A Madman and a Nun.”
In time, Tanovic set aside documentaries and shorter projects to concentrate on his screenplay for “No Man’s Land,” which he brought before the cameras with financing from Belgian, Italian, British and Slovenian film companies (the film was shot in Slovenia). Released in 2001, “No Man’s Land” received critical acclaim in Europe and America, and earned several awards for Tanovic: He won the Best Screenplay prize at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, the Best New Director trophy at the 2001 Cesar Awards, an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Mnookin, chair of the Program on Negotiation’s steering committee, is recognized as one of the outstanding legal scholars in the field of conflict resolution. He has applied an interdisciplinary approach to a wide range of issues ranging from families and children to multi-national corporations.
The Program on Negotiation is an inter-university consortium, involving faculty, graduate students and administrative staff from a range of disciplines and professional schools at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Simmons College and other Boston-area schools. PON’s film series event with Tanovic seeks to promote the organization’s mission to increase public awareness of the field of negotiation and conflict resolution.
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