Set in 1992 and 1993, Welcome to Sarajevo tells the story of Michael Henderson (Stephen Dillane) and a group of journalists covering the civil war in Bosnia. The picture has an edgy feel, and its fragmented start is like the war itself, jarring and unclear. We don't always know what we're looking at or what we're hearing; that's Winterbottom's way of evoking the war's chaos. At first, Henderson tries to cover the war from an emotional distance. But pretty soon, he finds himself taking sides, not so much political as moral. The bad guys are clearly the Bosnian Serbs, who put the city of Sarajevo under siege and shell its buildings indiscriminately. But not everyone inside the city is a good guy. Some are black marketeers, some are gangsters, some are snipers who rain terror from the rooftops. So the side Henderson takes is with the victims, those inside who are just trying to survive, most notably the children, many of them orphaned, all of them clearly innocent.

Henderson shapes his news stories as a plea for help from Western powers sitting on the sideline as a beautiful city is reduced to rubble. He photographs huge, empty cargo planes flying out of the war zone and asks why they aren't loaded with children desperate for sanctuary. Finally, he joins a relief effort led by an inexperienced American named Nina (Tomei) whose goal is to evacuate children who have relatives abroad. The Bosnian government, an unseen and perhaps underdeveloped villain, opposes a wider evacuation because such an event would be interpreted as a defeat. Here's where Henderson definitively crosses the line from observer to participant. He arranges a seat on the evacuation bus for a young girl named Emira (Emira Nusevic). Emira has no relatives abroad, but if Henderson can get her to England, he plans to adopt her.

The closing passage in Welcome to Sarajevo is inadequately justified as Henderson searches for and finally locates the mother who abandoned Emira when she was a baby. We haven't a clue as to why he bothers, though his efforts do afford her an opportunity for redemption. And we can only conclude that Harrelson's flashy Flynn character was included in hopes of gaining the film a wider distribution in the United States. Certainly, Flynn's character is never satisfactorily integrated into the picture's action.

Western journalist Michael Henderson (Stephen Dillane, left) becomes personally involved in the Bosnian civil war in Welcome to Sarajevo.

But those are minor complaints about a film with so much intelligence and so much heart. The picture offers an especially clear-eyed view of the practice of international journalism. Wars have a way of wearing you out, and the foreign correspondents in Bosnia are a jaded lot. In an early scene where the pack swoops in to cover the carnage of a mortar hit on a bread line, the journalists swarm like vultures over the twisted, mangled bodies of the dead. Back home, the bloodshed isn't enough for network news producers. In England, the dying in Sarajevo is bumped off the air for extended coverage of the marital separation of the Duke and Duchess of York.

And Welcome to Sarajevo captures the horrors of urban war as well as any picture I recall. For the residents of a clean, once-prosperous metropolis that from a distance might be Denver or Vancouver, death has become commonplace, deprivation an omnipresent reality. An educated young man named Risto (Goran Visnjic) is delighted to land a job as a driver for Henderson's news team. And in one painful scene, after being given three fresh eggs by Flynn, Risto shares them with friends, four hungry men hovering around a single plate for a taste of the omelette they've prepared. Later, scenes shot at a Serbian prison camp show captives as gaunt and vacant-eyed as those that haunt us from photographs of Auschwitz.