Kiss the Future

Opening night of Tucson Film Festival 2023

Featuring a post-film Q&A with screenwriter/filmmaker Bill S. Carter and producer Sarah Anthony!

An exploration of the perils of nationalism and art’s role as a weapon of resistance and activism, the new documentary Kiss the Future follows an underground community that continued to work, create, and live throughout the 1990s Siege of Sarajevo. Amid the breakup of Yugoslavia, the citizens of Sarajevo wake to find the city under siege and Bosnia at war. As the blockade stretches for years, living becomes an act of defiance and rock and punk music inspires and detracts from the daily nightmare of Serbian shells and snipers.

In a far-fetched scheme inspired by local resistance, Bill S. Carter, an American aid worker living in Sarajevo, reached out to the world’s biggest band, U2, to see if they could help raise global awareness of the devastating conflict. The band agreed and across the summer of 1993, their ZOO TV Tour featured live satellite interviews with local Sarajevans who described their plight to the concert-goers. When these interviews came to an end, the band pledged to perform in the city once the conflict was over.?

Kiss the Future follows the story of that promise, with a post-war concert that saw U2 play to over 45,000 local fans in a liberated city, a show that lives on as a joyous collective memory for the people of Sarajevo — proof that they didn’t just survive the blockade, but thrived in spite of it. That amid the horrors of the darkest human impulses, music and art can be acts of rebellion. Produced by Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Sarah Anthony.  (Dir. by Nenad Cicin-Sain, 2023, Ireland, 102 mins., Not Rated)