Angelina Jolie takes 'Land of Blood and Honey' back to Bosnia.

Angelina Jolie visited Sarajevo this week, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, to debut her film "In the Land of Blood and Honey."

Much of the Bosnian War film, which is the first film that Jolie has written and directed, takes place in Sarajevo, a city that was physically and emotionally devastated by the conflict, ibtimes.com reports.

On Jolie's part, screening the movie in Bosnia was a brave choice. Because of the subject matter, the film has been banned from Serb theaters in the country, and despite receiving an honorary Cinema for Peace award, some critics aren't happy with how "In the Land of Blood and Honey" portrays the events of the war.

In a quest for realism, Jolie gathered a multi-ethnic cast of actors that had lived through the conflict in some way -- some fighting in it and others watching from abroad. But the film has apparently opened old wounds for many people in the former-Yugoslavia.

"People back home are complaining, calling it anti-Serb, anti-Bosnian, and so on," Goran Kostic, the Bosnian Serb actor who plays the lead role of Danijel, said before the U.S. release of the film.

Jolie told The Guardian that she and the cast received threats of violence online, and at least one actor had his or her car windows broken, while another was the victim on an e-mail hacking job.

Even during the film-making process the prospect of a foreigner commenting on their own ethnic conflict was hard for some in the region. Jolie tried to shoot the movie on location, but a national women's survivor group petitioned the government to take away Jolie's film permit, which the government did, because the group thought the movie was about a woman who fell in love with her rapist.

"Nobody who had an issue with the film had read the script or knew what it was about, so it was a fear of the unknown, I suppose," Jolie said of the incident.

The women's group's ideas of the film, which were based on rumors instead of on the script, aren't far from the truth. Rape was a tragic facet of the Bosnian war, and Jolie, whose humanitarian work has focused on women and the victims of conflict, felt it was important to bring those issues to the fore.

But the lovers in the film met before the war began, and while they were reunited in a rape camp, violence is largely kept out of their relationship.