This is a vigorously unsentimental treatment of love in a time of war - the Bosnian conflict - based on a true story in which TV reporter Michael Henderson (Stephen Dillane) - Michael Nicholson of ITN - decides to smuggle a young refugee girl out to Britain. The seedy hotel-based world of foreign correspondents is expertly evoked by director Michael Winterbottom, though Woody Harrelson's tough-talking American journalist manages to upstage even the conflict itself.

Follow a group of international journalists into the heart of the once cosmopolitan city of Sarajevo—now a danger zone of sniper and mortar attacks where residents still live. While reporting on an American aid worker who’s trying to get children out of the country, a British correspondent decides to take an orphaned girl home to London.