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We just put this page up November 7, 2004.
More "cool" stuff to come, for want of a better expression....

We NEED to find "Anti-Sniper" by Falk, the Details Magazine article the movie SHOT THROUGH THE HEART was based on. If you know where we can get this in any form please e-mail us!

http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/ae/tv/9798/archives/1001bosnia.html

10:22 AM 10/1/1998

`Heart' makes Bosnian war unforgettable
By ANN HODGES
Copyright 1998 Houston Chronicle TV Critic

The horror that was Sarajevo -- and is now, in today's sickening headlines of the brutal massacre in Kosovo -- makes HBO's Shot Through the Heart an important, timely film.

And even more.

This tragic true story of best friends torn apart in a terrible war of old ethnic hatreds makes Shot Through the Heart a film you won't soon forget.

The people in this film are too much like us to forget. They work hard; they love their families; they watch TV and listen to CDs, and their kids even have pop-star posters on their bedroom walls.

There, but for the grace of God ... That, in the end, is the most powerful of this movie's many powerful messages.

Shot Through the Heart (7 p.m. Sunday on HBO), filmed in Sarajevo and Budapest, is based on John Falk's Details magazine piece, the true story of Vlado Sarzinsky and his best friend who became his enemy.

The cast is splendid -- from Linus Roache, who plays Vlado Sarzinsky, and Vincent Perez, who plays his friend Slavko, to the sniper-extras in the streets. They bring this war into our living room.

It begins in 1992, just days before Radavan Karadzic, the new leader of the Bosnian Serbs, announces the creation of a Serbian Republic of Bosnia.

Vlado and Slavko have been inseparable since they were boys on the Yugoslavian shooting team. Vlado is Croat and married to a Muslim; Slavko is a bachelor and a Serbian.

Yesterday, they were planning a great trip to the Barcelona Olympics. Today, Slavko is called up by the Serbian army, and he's begging Vlado to take his family and leave Sarajevo.

"This is Sarajevo, not Somalia," Vlado scoffs. "We're not refugees -- that's Third World stuff. If we walk away, we lose everything we've worked so hard to build. This is our home."

Serbian guns surround the city, but Vlado and his Muslim friends are still hopeful. "Like in the (Persian) Gulf," one predicts, "when the first guns go off, the Americans will come."

The guns go off, and the Americans don't come.

Then the Serbians send in snipers, to kill "men, women, children, anything that moves," and Slavko is the crack sniper. As Sarajevo's crack anti-sniper, it is Vlado's duty to take him out.

"You are killing women and children on your own street," Vlado begs in that wrenching confrontation.

"This is war," Slavko replies.

At HBO's press briefing, the real Vlado had flown in from Sarajevo, where he'd just seen the movie.

"I showed it to my closest friends only," he said. "It was touching. Soldiers, ex-soldiers who spent with me four years -- they cry. They said it is honest."

Vlado and Falk became friends when Falk went to Sarajevo as a free-lance reporter, "just to see what the war was like." Several years afterward

Suddenly the article ended (?)