Rade Serbedzija

If Milcho Manchevski's critically acclaimed debut film, "Before the Rain," sheds light on the tragedy of ethnic cleansing currently ravaging the region once known as Yugoslavia, the story of the film's star, Rade Serbedzija, illuminates the situation even further. A poet, singer and actor who had been one of Yugoslavia's best-loved stars for two decades, Serbedzija refused to take sides in the bloody war destroying his homeland and, hence, was branded a traitor in every quarter.

If Milcho Manchevski's critically acclaimed debut film, "Before the Rain," sheds light on the tragedy of ethnic cleansing currently ravaging the region once known as Yugoslavia, the story of the film's star, Rade Serbedzija, illuminates the situation even further. A poet, singer and actor who had been one of Yugoslavia's best-loved stars for two decades, Serbedzija refused to take sides in the bloody war destroying his homeland and, hence, was branded a traitor in every quarter.

UCLA Live will kick off its 2009-10 performing arts season with a world premiere that also represents the first original production to be created by the UCLA Live series: a new interpretation of the Euripides classic "Medea," starring Annette Bening and directed by Croatia's Lenki Udovicki. In an interview Wednesday, series artistic and executive director David Sefton said that despite the fact that Udovicki does most of her theater and opera directing abroad, she and her husband, Croatian actor Rade Serbedzija, are based in Los Angeles and Udovicki was eager to do a production here.

The casting director working on Gregor Nicholas' interracial love story "Broken English" spotted Aleksandra Vujcic, the young woman who would become the film's co-star, in an Auckland, New Zealand, bar. It was a good break for Vujcic, who didn't mind giving up her receptionist's job, and an even better break for Nicholas.

Re: "From the Ashes of a Ravaged Land" (by Kristine McKenna, Feb. 26): Let's see if I got this lesson on former Yugoslavia right: It was a communist paradise, where everybody was wealthy and happy and you could sleep in a park without fear of mugging. Then all of a sudden militant separatists fooled ordinary folk into believing they should break into separate countries, Muslims were pitted against Christians, and presto! a war! And not only have tens of thousands died, but worse yet, a "fantastic" communist actor with "big heart" (director Milcho Manchevski's words)

The ancient beauty of the Macedonian landscape in "Before the Rain" is a heartbreaking contrast to the violence within its borders. The expanses--the pure, limitless vistas and star-clustered night skies--are like fairy-tale enclosures for a tale of fratricidal horror. Even though the film deals with the current Balkan crises the landscape keeps drawing you back in time. The ongoing wars, we are made to feel, are as ancient as the terrain.

UCLA Film Archives' "Yugoslav Film Today" series presents six more features this week in Melnitz Theater. As before, they are of varying merit, and they all possess a heavy quality and a slowness of pace that makes all but the very finest Yugoslav films a chore to watch. What's most impressive about all the films in this series is their candor about life in a socialist state, in the past and in the present. Zoran Tadic's "Dreaming of a Rose" (1986), which screens at 5:30 p.m.

Sweetly randy, politically seditious and captivatingly pretty, "Manifesto" (at Cineplex Beverly Center only) is director Dusan Makavejev working at the top of his ironic form. Taking off from an Emile Zola story about a very young and beautiful aristocrat with a spotless image and a taste for sport among her manservants, Makavejev has added his own pungent views on zealots of every stripe, and created a deliciously bawdy fairy tale spun in confectionary colors.

What's the Saint doing in "The Saint"? Directed by Phillip Noyce, best known for "Patriot Games" and "Clear and Present Danger," both Tom Clancy adaptations, "The Saint" is meant to be that kind of James Bond/Batman franchise picture, a large-scale action adventure with running and chasing and things blowing up all over town.

Suddenly the war is really over. And as the news percolates through the mess hall at the Red Army's camp for displaced persons, a Russian soldier prances onstage with a saber, Auschwitz survivors dance "Cheek to Cheek," and romance--even among people with death lingering in their nostrils--somehow seems a possibility.

What Angelina Jolie has accomplished in "In the Land of Blood and Honey" is both impressive and unexpected. But because the task she set for herself is so difficult, it is not quite enough. Though not appearing on screen, Jolie functions as writer, director and co-producer of a film with subject matter so painful and emotionally complex it would be a challenge for even the most experienced creator. Not surprisingly for someone serious about involvement with humanitarian causes, Jolie has set "Blood and Honey" in the violent maelstrom of the former Yugoslavia during the war in Bosnia that lasted between 1992 and 1995.