it's hard to approach the good and bad in this film without being caught up a discussion of the message of bosna ! , for this is a film that explicitly sets out to convert its audience to its side , to make people aware of the war and to try to influence them to pressure their governments to intervene . it's a film that's very aware of itself , of the process of its making and of the influence it might have : for example , mitterand's visit to bosnia is portrayed as an outcome of information given to the french president by the director , bernard-henri levy . the film is full of very disturbing images : a mother and child fleeing from snipers in sarajevo ; bodies littering a street after a shell has landed on a bread queue , many of them with legs or faces blown off ; starving prisoners staring at the camera through the barbed wire of a concentration camp . it's impossible not to be moved by the suffering of these people , and difficult not to feel anger at the inaction of the diplomats who do little but talk while people are fighting for their lives and homes . the film makes much of comparisons between western indifference to bosnia today and western indifference to czechoslovakia and the spanish republic in the 1930s . there is , suggests levy , the same denial , the same explanations that it's all much too complex to get involved in . in 1945 people saw pictures of the concentration camps in poland and said " never again " , but now that the camps are back it seems that we would rather deny them , or suggest that there's fault on both sides , then determine to stop the atrocities . if there is anything i don't like about bosna ! , it is the incessant wordiness of the voice-over . perhaps levy was so anxious to persuade that he didn't dare to let the audience come to their own conclusions . at times sounding like a biblical prophet , at times hectoring us , at times reflecting on how the war affects our image of ourselves as europeans , the narration never lets the eloquent pictures speak for themselves , pictures that have more than enough power to move and to persuade on their own . 
