Sarajevo is a complex city of contradictions, historically known as both a richly diverse cultural centre of peoples living side by side, and a geopolitical flashpoint of stirred divisions.
There is a tangible sadness that persists in the air here, inevitably sensed by audiences attending the Sarajevo Film Festival, even as they immerse themselves in the heady party atmosphere of long Balkan nights. A showcase for new regional cinema, and a buzzing hub for forged collaborations in its well-attended Cinelink Industry Days, the festival is also very conscious of the role it has to play in reconciliation and healing of former Yugoslavia’s painful past. This intentionally comes to the fore in its programming decisions and preference for politically committed, rigorous work — a festival identity felt more than ever in its 29th edition, with a number strong new competition films in this vein gaining awards recognition.
What’s more, an unforeseen National Day of Mourning in the middle of the week, in the aftermath of a brutal femicide and protests around Bosnia, upended the schedule but occasioned a strong show of solidarity with the victims of gender-based violence from the festival team and attendees.
The Heart of Sarajevo for Best Feature Film, chosen by a five-person jury led by Australian actress Mia Wasikowska, went to Georgian director Elene Naveriani’s Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, a wry celebration of feminist non-conformity, which premiered in Cannes. In addition, its star, Ekaterine Chavleishvili, came away with the Best Actress award. The prizes will be a morale boost for a Georgian film industry currently in turmoil and struggling against repressive state intervention.
Sarajevo opened on an emotional high note, with packed multi-venue screenings of Kiss the Future, Ninad Cicin-Sain’s documentary about the music underground that flourished in 90’s Sarajevo despite, or indeed because of, the 1,425-day siege of the capital by Serb forces. The film traces the background of the first major concert in the city afterward, when rock band U2 dared to come.
The 90s were revisited, too, in several of the strongest features in competition. Vladimir Perisic’s devastating coming-of-age drama Lost Country, for which Jovan Gonic won Best Actor, is set when politician Slobodan Milosevic was consolidating power, and reckons with a Serbia generationally torn apart and imperiled by ethno-nationalism. Best Director went to Philip Sotnychenko for his oblique and fragmentary La Palisiada, which takes place between that tumultuous decade and the current day. Through an inventive take on the police procedural, it explores a legacy of Soviet, state-sanctioned violence passed down to young Ukrainian artists. How trauma and old fears circumscribe the present was also the theme of Sarajevo-born director Una Gunjak’s Excursion, screening out of competition, another memorable coming-of-ager, the focus of which is as much society’s struggles as it is the teen at its heart.
The power imbalances of an era of aggressive market capitalism in Europe were another preoccupation of the competition programmes. World premiere Europa, directed by Austrian-Iranian director Sudabeh Mortezai, highlights the anxieties and neo-colonial exploitation of those marginalised in the European Union. Fresh and satirical, this dystopian thriller depicts a shadowy conglomerate that tries to take over land in Albania for its operations. In the doc line-up, Best Documentary winner Nemanja Vojinovic’s Bottlemen, dubbed an “ecological western,” shows low-wage trash heap workers scrabbling to subsist in Serbia, while Croatia’s Goran Devic delivered a playfully self-aware take on workplace union battles in What’s to be Done?
Two notable films are unflinching and courageous in confronting some of the worst atrocities of the Bosnian War. Through their reconfiguration of war crimes testimony and their formally audacious experimental approaches, Bosnian filmmaker Selma Doborac’s De Facto, and Macedonian documentarian Kumjana Novakova’s Silence of Reason, were two of the most psychologically demanding, yet masterfully impressive, films to be seen in the festival — very different from one another, yet almost complementary in the way they both contribute to a wider dialogue of resistance voices and methods of addressing and processing past horrors. De Facto was awarded the Special Award for Promoting Gender Equality, while Silence of Reason came away with the Human Rights Award.
Meanwhile, Self-Portrait Along the Borderline is a stand-out essayistic exploration of the fractured nature of relations between Georgia and Abkhazia through director Anna Dziapshipa’s own heritage and identity. It contributed further to the impression many of this year’s best competition films were documentaries, made with a particular sensitivity and feel for poetry.
Out of Competition, noteworthy work was to be found in the Dealing with the Past section, an annual sidebar to facilitate the processing of regional history. It included found-footage virtuoso Jean-Gabriel Periot’s Facing Darkness, which shows the 90’s Siege of Sarajevo through the eyes of those who shot footage there, and those who went off to fight. The March on Rome, which charts through archives the rise and self-mythologising of Mussolini’s Fascist regime in Italy, also screened. It was made by Mark Cousins, who was honoured with a Heart of Sarajevo award for his contribution to the art of film, and who also gave a typically heartfelt masterclass.
But it wasn’t all heaviness and historical horror in the Sarajevo line-up. A powerhouse masterclass series of big names boasted leading arthouse auteurs Jessica Hausner and Lynne Ramsay. Writer and director Charlie Kaufman packed out the large Bosnian Cultural Center auditorium for an endearing session of his trademark wit and anxiety-tinged existentialism, with bracing words of support for the Writers’ Strike and an impassioned rejection of AI. Other corners, like the Kinoscope Surreal sidebar, were not short on well-crafted, poppy genre splashes, including U.S. director Jennifer Reeder’s smart feminist body-horror Perpetrator.
Then mid-week, a National Day of Mourning brought all festival events grinding to a halt, following a brutal femicide in the Bosnian town of Gradacac and protests over gender-based violence, policing and judicial failures. All public screenings, talks and social events were called off, with the exception of a panel on “Femicide in Film, Television and New Media,” pulled together at short notice.
A logistical scramble ensued, as the festival team worked to reschedule all that was missed on the closing days. Premieres were pushed back, but filmmakers attending overwhelmingly supported the move to stop for one day, and the willingness of the festival to make a strong stand of solidarity with the marginalised in a manner that could not go unnoticed. It was a timely reminder to all attendees that the global problems of the past are very much alive in the present.
Awards of the 29th Sarajevo Film Festival:
HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST FEATURE FILM
BLACKBIRD BLACKBIRD BLACKBERRY
Georgia, Switzerland
Director: Elene Naveriani
HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST DIRECTOR
Philip Sotnychenko, LA PALISIADA
Ukraine
HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST ACTRESS
Ekaterine Chavleishvili, BLACKBIRD BLACKBIRD BLACKBERRY
Georgia, Switzerland
HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST ACTOR
Jovan Ginic, LOST COUNTRY
Serbia, France, Croatia, Luxembourg, Qatar
HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST DOCUMENTARY FILM
BOTTLEMEN
Serbia, Slovenia
Director: Nemanja Vojinovic
HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST SHORT DOCUMENTARY FILM
VALERIJA
Croatia
Director: Sara Jurincic
HUMAN RIGHTS AWARD
SILENCE OF REASON
North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Director: Kumjana Novakova
SPECIAL JURY AWARD
FAIRY GARDEN
Hungary, Romania, Croatia
Director: Gergo Somogyvari
HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST SHORT FILM – eligible for Oscar® nomination
27
Hungary, France
Director: Flora Anna Buda
HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST STUDENT FILM
FALLING
Hungary, Belgium, Portugal
Director: Anna Gyimesi
JURY SPECIAL MENTION
SHORT CUT GRASS
Croatia
Director: David Gaso
SPECIAL AWARD FOR PROMOTING GENDER EQUALITY
DE FACTO
Austria, Germany
Director: Selma Doborac
