Feeling refreshed and re-energised after two years in Covid limbo, the 27th Sarajevo film festival seemed busier than ever this year, bouncing back with a strong international program and a starry guest list. The compact heart of the Bosnian capital resembled an open-air street carnival for most of the last 10 days, with throbbing Eurodance DJ music competing to drown out rowdy local turbo-folk bands and karaoke bars under the balmy night sky. Screenings, talks and events across the city were well attended by public and industry insiders like, while cafes and restaurants were packed to bursting point. Pandemic or no pandemic, there ain’t no party like a Balkan party.
With Sarajevo’s former head of industry Jovan Marjanovic smoothly succeeding festival founder and long-standing head Mirsad Purivatra as overall boss this year, while Maša Markovic steps into his old industry job, the team is keener than ever to emphasise its long-term, business-friendly role in nurturing local talent and brokering regional deals. Alongside the Talents Sarajevo apprenticeship platform and busy CineLink co-production market, glitzy world premieres of locally shot TV dramas were more prominent than ever this year as Balkan telecoms companies compete to become regional streaming powerhouses. For visiting film critics, the festival also felt a little slicker than previous years. The positive news is that online ticketing has finally arrived in Bosnia, replacing the cumbersome old Soviet-style system of standing in long lines, twice, 24 hours apart. It would perhaps have been more useful to inform media guests of this bold new development in advance, not midway through the festival, but it is still a promising step forward.
But for all is eccentric quirks, Sarajevo remains a charmingly characterful festival with a warmly personal, highly social, almost village-like feel. Among the venues where screenings and gatherings take place are former synagogues, outside squares, army meeting halls, and historic hotels still pockmarked with bullet-holes from the collapse of various empires across the 20th century, from Ottoman Turkey to Hapsburg Austria, the former Soviet Union and Tito’s Yugoslavia. The past is never over in the Balkans. It’s not even the past. History hangs heavy in the air here like heady perfume.
This year’s guest speaker selection included a stellar cast of honorary Heart of Sarajevo award-winners including Mads Mikkelsen, Jessie Eisenberg, Paul Schrader and Swedish writer-director Ruben Östlund, whose Cannes Palme d’Or-winner Triangle of Sadness opened the screening program across multiple cinemas. Aside from his uproarious satirical films, Östlund himself is great comic value in person. Keen Sarajevo audiences braved a torrential downpour to watch him share a lively, funny, wide-ranging masterclass chat with Film Verdict contributor Carmen Gray in which he revealed details of his next feature. Set on board a long haul flight, The Entertainment System is Down will be another savagely funny skewering of bourgeois values, reuniting the puckish Swede with his Triangle co-star Woody Harrelson.
One impressively inclusive, unpretentious element of the Sarajevo program this year was its healthy crossover with Locarno film festival in Switzerland, which occurs just before the Balkan gathering and often overlaps. Several of the more acclaimed titles in the main competition played in Bosnia straight after their Swiss world premiere. Indeed, one much-deserved prize-winner at both was Croatian actor-director Juraj Lerotic’s powerful debut feature Safe Place, a lightly fictionalised account of the real-life mental decline and suicide of his own brother. In an unprecedented slam-dunk, Lerotic won both the Best Film main prize plus Best Actor award for his piercing, emotionally raw lead performance. More festivals and plaudits surely await this bravely personal drama.
Bleak period films about the bloody wars that broke up the former Yugoslavia have long been fixtures in Sarajevo, for obvious reasons. But this year a more urgent conflict inevitably took centre stage, with Ukraine’s Maryina Er Gorbach taking home Best Director prize for her stunning Sundance-winner Klondike, a frontier thriller set in the Wild East of Donbas. Fellow Ukrainian director Igor Ivanko also won a Special Jury prize for Fragile Memory, a touching homage to the fading memories of his ailing father, a celebrated photographer during the Soviet era. And a stand-out entry in the short films program was the world premiere of Liturgy of Anti-Tank Obstacles, a playful and witty commentary on Russian aggression in Ukraine from Pamfir director Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk.
Meanwhile, films from the former Yugoslav nations generally took a more nuanced, reflective, personally slanted angle than usual on the region’s troubled past and present. Serbian director Srdjan Keca’s Museum of the Revolution, an empathetic portrait of marginalised outsiders struggling to survive in modern-day Belgrade, won the Best Documentary prize while fellow Serb Nataša Urban’s elegant essay-film The Eclipse used her own family memories to interrogate wider collective amnesia about her nation’s dark history. Local audiences in Sarajevo also gave a very warm welcome to Slovenian director Dominik Mencej’s feature debut Riders, a rare drama about the post-war period of the late 1990s that looks beyond sectarian blood feuds to address more sunny, uplifting, coming-of-age themes.
These are encouraging signs that the next generation of Balkan cinema may finally be laying past traumas to rest and moving forward with growing optimism and solidarity. History may still hang heavy in the air here, but a promising sense of renewal was also evident in Sarajevo this year, blowing on the perfumed breeze.
