Yesterday, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt made an appearance at the Sarajevo Film Festival, and we don’t have access to any of the photos! Boo. You can see some here and here, though. Angelina wore an oddly bright Elie Saab gown and Brad looked nice. Angelina was there because she was awarded the “Honorary Heart of Sarajevo” Award for directing a film about the war, The Land of Blood and Honey, which will be out later this year. When Angelina’s leading lady, Zana Marjanovic, presented Angelina with the award, Angelina received wild, non-stop applause, and an insider says Angelina was nearly moved to tears. Angelina told reporters, “I love this country. I was honored to have a chance to meet everybody. This movie was a chance to bring attention to the situation that happened so long ago, and I hope that it brings attention and more dialogue to remind people what everybody here went through.” Damn, I wish we had ANY photos from this film festival – Michael Fassbender was there a few days ago with a newly shaved head too. BOO on our photo agencies for not buying these photos.

Anyway, Angelina has a new interview in The Financial Times this weekend. You can only read the whole thing by subscription, which I’m not going to do, but various outlets had excerpts from the piece:

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt have maintained a nomadic lifestyle with their six children over the years, but the kids have strong connections to their own cultures, Jolie reveals in a new interview. The actress, 36, who adopted three of her children – Maddox, 9, from Cambodia; Pax, 7, from Vietnam; and Zahara, 6, from Ethiopia – and gave birth to Shiloh, 5, in Namibia, and twins Vivienne and Knox, 3, in France, makes sure her kids know where they came from.

“They are all learning about each other’s cultures as well as being proud of their own,” she tells the Financial Times. “So it’s not like just the boys get to do the Asian thing. They all have their flags over their beds and their individual pride.”

Of course, keeping up with their international visits is a challenge. “We owe Vietnam a visit, because Pax is due,” she says. “Z wants to get back to Africa, and Shiloh too. So everyone takes their turns in their country.”

Jolie also opened up about becoming a mom of six has changed her relationship with work.

“I’ve never not been grateful to be an actor,” she says. “But I think when I was younger I needed [acting] more. I was trying to question things in life so you find these characters that help you find things and grow.”

“It’s like being in therapy, in a way. You’re drawn to certain roles because they question something about life, or about love, or about freedom. You ask these questions as you grow up: am I strong enough, am I sane enough? Do I understand love, do I understand myself?” Now, she adds, “I’m older and I know who I am … and I’m less interested in the character helping me answer something … than in being able to answer it for myself, as a woman, as an adult, with my family.”

Talking about Salt, Jolie explains: “I’d just had the twins,” she recalls. “I’d been in a nightgown for a very, very long time. And I was sitting in the hospital breastfeeding and reading this script in my nightgown, feeling so soft and mama … and I was flipping these pages and it was all fighting and shooting guns. I thought, ‘That’s what I need. I need to get out of my nightgown and I need a gun.’ I’m sure many a woman who has been through childbirth has thought ‘It would be nice to get a little physical, get a little wild … to remember what that other side is like.’ ”

Jolie and her longtime love Brad Pitt have six children together — Maddox, 9, Pax, 7, Zahara, 6, Shiloh, 5, and 3-year-old twins Knox and Vivienne — and the family is famous for their nomadic lifestyle. “Home is wherever we are,” she says. But does she ever feel rootless? “Yes, but happily. I’m very bad at staying in one place. I’m also bad at sitting still… There’s so much to explore in the world… So I love travel. If you can travel I think it’s the best way to raise kids.”

Her directorial debut — In the Land of Blood and Honey — is a love story she also wrote, which is set in the Bosnian war. “I prefer [being behind the camera] to acting,” she admits. “I think I’ve learnt something from all of [the directors I’ve worked with] — even the ones I didn’t like… I also learned a lot from Clint Eastwood about how to appreciate the members of the crew, empowering them to do their job.”

But Jolie doesn’t plan to stay in the business forever. “As Brad and I get older we’re going to do fewer films. I’ve been working for a long time, he’s been working for a long time,” she says. “We’ve had a nice run and I don’t want to be doing this our whole lives. There are a lot of other things to do.”

She has been to Cambodia this year, to shoot an advertising campaign for Louis Vuitton with Annie Leibovitz. An impoverished country might seem like an odd place for a luxury fashion house to shoot an ad campaign but the final decision was made by Jolie herself. “To actually do it there, to highlight the beauty of the country, was something I was very happy to do because it is a place people should travel to,” she says. Indeed, she and Pitt have a house there—”it’s a little place on stilts”. Her fee from the campaign will go towards charitable projects in the country, she says, building on work she began with a foundation the family established in Maddox’s name. “It’s focused on protecting mountains from deforestation, poaching and clearing landmines. We put it together for Mad so when he’s older he’ll hopefully take it over.”

China is on her list of places still to explore, and she would love to see Burma, “but not in the wrong circumstances”, given that the country is under the control of an oppressive military junta. “And Iran. I’d love to go [to] Iran.” Her dream, however, is to “cross the Sahara. It takes 28 days … it would have to be on a camel. I wonder if I could do it in pieces and station the kids along the way,” she muses.

[From The Financial Times, via Us Weekly & People Mag]

I understand that Angelina’s top priority is being a mom, and good for her. But I’m getting so friggin’ tired of hearing her talk about how she’s going to be cutting back or phasing out working and all of that. She’s been saying it for years, and she needs to find a new topic of conversation for all of the interviews she does year after year to promote all of films she does year after year. I don’t begrudge her working, nor do I begrudge her the time she spends with her family. But I just get tired of her ringing the same “I’m taking time off, I’m spending more time with my family” bell when she works about the same as always.

UPDATE: Ah, Slate has the full Financial Times article here. It’s a pretty good piece. The best part is her response when she’s asked about The News of the World, the tabloid which she and Brad sued after they reported that she and Brad were breaking up. “I did hear something about that … clearly I never read it. So it’s hard to know how much of a loss it is.” Diplomatic.

Photos courtesy of Fame & WENN.