Sarajevo Documentary Features U2

U2 will be featured in a new documentary about Sarajevo, but don’t expect the primary focus to be on the band, according to actor and film producer Matt Damon.

 Kiss the Future –which debuts at AMC theaters today (Feb. 23)–will focus on  group of underground musicians and creatives during the siege of Sarajevo, which lasted from April 1992 to February 1996. Aid worker Bill Carter reached out to U2 to connect them with the locals, which eventually led to them playing a concert at Koševo Stadium in 1997 to celebrate the country’s liberation.

“They didn’t want it to be yet another U2 concert film. They didn’t want to be the primary focus,” Damon says, noting the film’s director, Nenad Cicin-Sain, was fine with that because he wanted the film to tell the story of Carter and the Sarajevans.

“He wanted to present their stories of what happened as a sort of collective memory of the time,” he says. “Once the band heard that, they came on board as quickly as we did.”

But while U2 wasn’t the focus of the film, Damon wanted to include the footage to show the importance of the concert.

“To do this properly, we not only needed their sign off, but also their footage from the concerts where they did the satellite interviews with Bill Carter as well as footage from the concert they performed in Sarajevo — this had never been seen before, by anyone,” he says. “Without that, we simply couldn’t tell the story.”

U2 will wrap their residency shows at the Sphere in Las Vegas in March.

Kiss the Future will stream on Paramount + later this year.