It is only Day One at Sarajevo Film Festival and already the Bosnian capital is hotting up. Literally, with sauna-like weather pushing temperatures close to 40 degrees downtown, plus sun-scorched sidewalks that could double as frying pans. But the city is glowing with anticipation too, as the largest film gathering in Southwest Europe gears up to celebrate its 30th anniversary in typically hot-blooded Balkan style, aided by a starry guest list including Meg Ryan, Alexander Payne, Elia Suleiman and John Turturro.
A defiant cultural statement launched in 1995 in the depths of a notorious wartime siege, Sarajevo has not only survived but thrived, growing from humble roots to major European movie showcase, with attendance regularly topping 100,000 people plus a boost to the local economy recently estimated at around $30 million. Indeed, the ever-expanding Balkan bonanza is marking its milestone birthday this year with big changes in personnel and location. For a start, Ishak Jalimam makes his debut as head of the festival’s CineLink industry section, replacing Amra Bakšic Camo, who founded and led this fertile co-production crossroads for the last two decades.
Meanwhile, much of the festival’s daily business is physically shifting westwards, away from its long-time hub around the National Theatre and venerable Hotel Europe on the edge of the bustling, tourist-heavy Old Town. While these historic landmarks will still host screenings and parties, most films will now screen at a recently completed multiplex in the city’s regenerating western fringes, close to the yellow Lego-block hulk of the Hotel Holiday, formerly the Holiday Inn, an infamous bullet-ridden target for snipers during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
An all-new Festival Garden and outdoor screening venue will also debut in the same corner of Sarajevo this year, nestled between a growing new commercial zone of shopping malls, modern office blocks and skyscrapers. The festival’s artistic director Jovan Marjanovic likens this shift to the Berlinale relocating to its new Potsdamer Platz home in 2000, insisting the changes will allow for a wider engagement with all the city’s population,
Program wise, the Sarajevo banqueting table is once again groaning with home-grown Balkan produce alongside more international flavours. Indeed, the festival will open and close with gala screenings of new features from two of the region’s most high-profile talents, My Late Summer by Danis Tanovic, Bosnia’s only Oscar-winning director to date for No Man’s Land (2001), and Serbian actor-director Mirjana Karanovic’s Mother Mara, following up her Sundance-launched war-crimes drama A Good Wife (2016).
Tanovic’s breezy, bittersweet portrait of a young woman trying to piece together her shattered identity on an idyllic holiday island will probably have more local than international appeal. But advance word is very good for Karanovic’s stylish drama about a a sixty-something widow wrestling with family tragedy and sexual desire for a younger man.
This year, Sarajevo’s four competition sections will include 19 world premieres, plus 21 regional and nine international debuts. While most of the bigger European festivals insist on worldwide exclusives in their main prize contests, Sarajevo has always fielded a mix of new and second-run films, smartly turning minor-league necessity to their advantage by booking films still basking in critical acclaim and awards buzz from recent overseas premieres.
Some hotly anticipated titles competing in the Balkans over the coming week include Maya Novakovic’s Sheffield Docfest prize-winner At the Door of the House Who Will Come Knocking , a poetically beautiful depiction of rustic life in Bosnia, Slovenian director Sonja Prosenc’s tragicomic satire Family Therapy, which enjoyed a warm welcome in Tribeca, Romanian Emanuel Pârvu’s LGBT drama Three Kilometers to the End of the World, which earned acclaim in competition in Cannes, and Georgian film-maker Tato Kotetishvili’s surreal comic road movie Holy Electricity, one of a handful of crossover films arriving in Sarajevo fresh from their Locarno launch.
With the festival’s history so deeply rooted in wartime trauma, it make sense that films about the 1990s Balkan conflicts have long been a fixture. This year’s program includes the deeply moving documentary Sniper Alley – To My Brother, directed by Italian duo Cristiana Lucia Grilli and Francesco Toscani, about a 41-year-old Dzemil Hodzic’s quest to track down photographs of his brother Amel, killed by a sniper in 1995 during a shaky official ceasefire.
More recently, local war stories have found a tragic contemporary echo in films from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Ukrainian director Lesia Diak’s powerfully personal Dad’s Lullaby is another stand-out competition entry this year, exploring the wrenching effect when frontline fighters return home to their families. Sarajevo film festival is no longer dominated by the horrors of history, but it still has a unique ability to address these subjects with grit, defiance and compassion.
