Title: Sarajevo Safari
Genre:
War Thriller / Historical Drama
Logline:
During the siege of Sarajevo, a lone Mossad sniper is secretly inserted into the city to protect its Jewish community after intelligence reveals foreign mercenaries are paying to hunt civilians for sport—turning genocide into a grotesque game.
Setting:
Sarajevo, Bosnia, 1993.
A once-cosmopolitan city reduced to rubble, where snipers rule the hills, breadlines are death traps, and survival depends on silence, speed, and luck.
Protagonist:
Joseph Christian Jukic as Ariel Ben-Yosef (codename: Shomer — “Guardian”)
A veteran Mossad sniper with Balkan roots and a haunted past. Ariel is disciplined, restrained, and deeply moral—trained to kill, but committed to preserving life. His connection to Sarajevo’s Jewish community is both professional and personal: this is one of the last intact Jewish enclaves in Europe, and history has taught him what happens when the world looks away.
Antagonists:
An informal network of foreign thrill-seekers, war tourists, and rogue mercenaries—wealthy men who pay local militias and criminal middlemen for the chance to “hunt” Jews and other civilians during the chaos of the siege.
They call it “Sarajevo Safari.”
They keep score.
These men are not ideologues—they are worse. They are bored, entitled, and insulated from consequence.
Story Treatment:
ACT I – THE HUNT
As Sarajevo starves under siege, Mossad intercepts disturbing intelligence: encrypted communications and intercepted photographs revealing wealthy foreigners boasting about “clean kills” and “moving targets.” The targets are Jewish civilians—easily identifiable through community routes, synagogues, aid lines, and old family registries.
Ariel Ben-Yosef is dispatched quietly. No official presence. No extraction guarantee.
Upon entering Sarajevo through underground tunnels and smuggler routes, Ariel witnesses the city’s daily terror: mothers sprinting across intersections, children learning the sound of incoming fire, the dead left where they fall. He makes contact with a small Jewish council sheltering families in basements and abandoned buildings.
They do not ask him to fight.
They ask him to stay.
ACT II – THE GUARDIAN
Ariel begins counter-sniper operations—not for territory, but for people.
He studies patterns: sniper nests timed to prayer routes, food deliveries ambushed for sport, shots taken not for strategy but spectacle. Ariel realizes these hunters don’t care about sides in the war—they care about trophies.
One by one, Ariel neutralizes the hunters with surgical precision. No bravado. No celebration. Each kill weighs on him. Between missions, he helps families move at night, trains civilians how to disappear into the city, and listens to stories of a Sarajevo that once believed it had escaped Europe’s darkest instincts.
The hunters notice.
They begin hunting him.
ACT III – THE COUNTER-SAFARI
The foreign hunters escalate, turning the game into a personal challenge. They broadcast taunts over illicit radio frequencies. They raise the bounty. They want the “ghost sniper.”
As winter sets in, Ariel is wounded but refuses evacuation. The Jewish community prepares for forced evacuation—something history has taught them never to trust.
In a final night-long confrontation across rooftops, cemeteries, and burned-out apartment blocks, Ariel turns the city itself into a weapon. He outthinks, outwaits, and outlasts the hunters—exposing their names, methods, and sponsors through leaked intelligence sent to international media.
By morning, the hunters are dead, fled, or exposed.
The “safari” is over.
Final Image:
Ariel watches dawn break over Sarajevo. The city still burns. The war is not over. But children walk one street without running.
Ariel disappears back into the shadows, leaving behind no medal, no record—only lives saved.
A title card appears:
“During the siege of Sarajevo, over 10,000 civilians were killed.
Many crimes were never recorded.
Some were stopped by people who were never meant to exist.”
Themes:
- The banality of evil versus the discipline of conscience
- Genocide as entertainment in the age of wealth and distance
- Moral responsibility when the world refuses to intervene
- Memory, survival, and the cost of protection
Tone & Style:
- Gritty realism, restrained violence
- Sniper sequences shot with silence and tension rather than spectacle
- Influences: Enemy at the Gates, Munich, The Pianist, Sicario
- No glorification of war—only survival and resistance