It's a shame that the internet is a virtual medium, because there are a lot of people out there that I'd like to express my deep feelings of friendship to, and having spent the last two years here in Serbia, I'd like to do it in a truly Serbian way.
Sarajevo Film Festival Kicks Off Friday
| 14 August 2008 | By Conor Gaffney in Sarajevo
This year’s festival will open with Bosnian director Aida Begic’s film “Snow”, set in the small Bosnian village of Slavno in 1997. In the film a heavy snowfall isolates Slavno whose residents, busy reconstructing their lives after the war, must choose between accepting a business man’s bribe to leave and staying and scraping by to survive.
The screening of “Snow” and other films from the former Yugoslavia make the Sarajevo Film Festival an important site of discussion about issues facing the region after the war. “Our society still deals with the war,” said Elma Tataragic who co-wrote and produced “Snow”, “and film is a perfect medium to show this”.
The Sarajevo Film Festival has a wartime heritage: the first festival convened in 1995. 15,000 people from the region attended despite the danger of travelling to besieged Sarajevo to watch Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction”.
Both during and since the war, film has played a central role in Bosnia. “We had filmmakers documenting the atrocities throughout the war,” Tataragic said, “Veteran filmmakers who decided to stay in Sarajevo and share the destiny of their homeland together with young filmmakers and film students made important documentaries”.
Now the festival, which was visited by over 100,000 people last year, will offer their visions of post-war Yugoslavia to an international audience. The festival’s “In Focus” series showcases seven films from the region, while the “Talent Campus” will bring 80 directors, actors, screenwriters, and producers from the Balkans and Europe to Sarajevo for a series of lectures and workshops.
Tataragic estimates that cinema in the region is among the best in Europe: “The regional cinema has developed in many ways production wise and young filmmakers have taken over the entire scene,” she said, “It is a very vibrant and vital cinema at this moment and I can say that it is the most promising cinema in Europe generally”.
The Sarajevo Film Festival is also an important exchange for filmmakers from the Balkans.
“The co-production within the region is more frequent and the exchange of talent and know-how is very important,” said Tataragic.
The festival is regularly visited by leaders in world cinema. This year American actor Kevin Spacey, American director Charlie Kaufman, and Slovenian philosopher and psycho-analyst Slavoj Zizek will participate in the festival. Past international guests include: Bono, Jeremy Irons, Ulrich Seidl, and Michael Moore.
This week Orlando Bloom, who will star in a new film about the siege of Sarajevo, visited the festival.
As people begin to pour into Sarajevo, the Film Festival prepares itself for another busy year. Elma Tataragic, a selector for the festival, says the purpose of the event will not be lost on the crowd. “Film cannot change our situation but it can help for some issues not to be forgotten,” she said.
She added, “Film and art generally has a responsibility to help us never forget these problems and to help us talk about them and discuss them. Put like this, it sounds like some kind of therapy but art must be responsible and film is good for this responsibility since it brings very individual stories to a universal level”.
Conor Gaffney is an intern with BIRN and an undergraduate at the University of Chicago
