There was a sense of change in the air as the Sarajevo Film Festival celebrated its 30th edition, with expanded locations across the city, an unusually rich program of local and international films, plus a stellar list of guest speakers including John Turturro, Alexander Payne, Elia Suleiman and Meg Ryan. Picking up her honorary Heart of Sarajevo award, Ryan noted with approval that the Balkan cinematic gathering, born during the horrors of wartime, is proof that “art and culture are an act of resistance”. Greeted by a huge crowd in the Bosnian capital, the Hollywood rom-com icon added “thank you so much for resisting.”
Headed by veteran US writer-director Paul Schrader, the main festival jury mostly celebrated films from the wider Southeast European region this year. The Heart of Sarajevo prize for Best Picture went to Romanian director Emanuel Pârvu’s Three Kilometers to the End of the World, a piercing drama about the aftermath of a homophobic attack in a small Danube town, which previously premiered in Cannes. The Best Director prize went to Greece’s Yorgos Zois for his stylish fantasy crime thriller Arcadia, which first screened in the Berlinale. Voted Best Actress was Anab Ahmed Ibrahim for Mo Harawe’s The Village Next to Paradise, the first Somalian film ever to compete in Cannes, while Doru Bem won Best Actor for his performance in Andrei Cohn’s Holy Week, a powerful indictment of antisemitism in 19th century Romania.
Meanwhile, the big prize-winner from Sarajevo’s strong shorts program was Kosovan director Norika Sefa’s Like a Sickly Yellow, which takes a experimental approach to memories of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Another stand-out contender was Nebojša Slijecevic’s Cannes Palme D’Or winner The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent, which recreates a notorious massacre of Bosnian Muslims by Serb forces in 1993. Of course, films which revisit the bloody ethnic wars that tore the former Yugoslavia apart have always been a Sarajevo signature, for obvious reasons. The festival itself was launched in 1995 during the notorious four-year siege of the city, which killed around 14,000 people, including more than 5,000 civilians.
All the same, there was a stronger sense than usual in Sarajevo this year that Balkan cinema is finally shaking off the burden of its tragic past and embracing a new chapter. In her dreamlike docu-poem At the Door of the House Who Will Come Knocking, for example, Bosnian director Maja Novakovic offered an exquisite meditation on loss, loneliness and landscape. Meanwhile, Slovenian writer-director Sonaj Prosenc’s Family Therapy was a visually ravishing class-war satire with echoes of vintage Michael Haneke, and actor-director Miranda Karanevic explored a middle-aged woman’s feelings of grief and desire in her superbly crafted second feature Mother Mara, which world premiered out of competition as the festival’s closing gala.
All these films could play to a wider global audience beyond Sarajevo – indeed many of them already have – and make just as deep an emotional connection as with local audiences. This is Balkan cinema of rare quality and universal scope, glossy and imaginative and ready to hold its own on the world stage. Through beauty and joy, humour and anger, cinema itself becomes an act of resistance.
