FESTS



 

Sarajevo Film Festival

Driving in from the Sarajevo airport down Sniper Alley – the long boulevard that bisects this Bosnian city, so dubbed for the artillery fire that rained down from the mountains on its civilians during the war – I see dozens of posters depicting a young girl amid bunches of flowers. The simple, optimistic poster advertises the fifth annual Sarajevo Film Festival. This year the optimism is well founded. The Festival has survived both the war and the start-up pains that hobble many such new international cultural events, turning it into one of the most rewarding stops on the festival circuit.

I say this despite the fact that the rewards young American filmmakers often seek at festivals – distribution deals and industry connections – are not to be found at Sarajevo. And the regional sales that can sometimes occur in the smaller world festivals are also absent here due to the depressed postwar economy. But what is in Sarajevo is a thrilling connection between film – and, in a broader sense, art –and regional and world politics.

When the Festival was started in 1995, in the thick of the war, the screening of films was in itself an act of political defiance. Filmmakers like Leos Carax had to be flown in on French government planes, and screenings were often on video, underground – no small feat in a city where the power was often bombed out. The exhibition of films and the appearance of their creators in Sarajevo constituted a vital outreach to the international community and a statement that the city’s proud, cosmopolitan intellectual heritage could not be silenced.

The Sarajevo Film Festival’s president is Mirsad Purivatra (or "Miro," as he is affectionately called), who is also the director of Sarajevo’s Obala Arts Center. Years ago I was privileged to produce a masterpiece of performance theater by Obala entitled "Tattoo Theater" at the Kitchen in New York City. It wasn’t until I arrived at the Obala that I learned that Miro, whom I had last seen in 1992, was running the Festival. He explained to me that war-induced financial pressures had forced Obala to turn away from theater toward visual-art exhibitions and then, in 1995, film. The Festival’s own website admits that its first year "could have seemed more like a bizarre act of resistance than a real film festival." But early supporters like Carax, Susan Sontag and Locarano’s Marco Mueller, in addition to the Bosnian filmmaking community, provided solid backing. That first year featured 37 films and attracted 15,000 viewers.

This year the Festival offered many more screenings in six presentation categories. One, "Open Air," consisted largely of Hollywood hits – Shakespeare in Love, American Pie and You've Got Mail – screened in a giant outdoor theater. Miro told me that his biggest regret for this year’s Festival is not obtaining Star Wars: The Phantom Menance. Western lefties may decry the imperialism of the American entertainment industry, but here in Sarajevo, as elsewhere in the world, this mainstream fare is what draws everyday city folk out en masse. As Miro explained, the thought that over 3,000 members of this mixed city could congregate in one place at night is its own form of radical imagination.

Its other sections, though, earn Sarajevo a reputation for presenting challenging cinema. This year the Festival invited American critic and curator Howard Feinstein to create "Panorama," a section dedicated largely to auteur cinema. A strong grouping of 17 films, it consisted of work by established international directors (Egoyan, Winterbottom, Almodovar, Solondz, Ripstein), bold newcomers (such as Yesim Ustaoglu with Journey to the Sun, a bracing tale of friendship in contemporary Turkey, and Australian John S. Curran’s story of obsessive love, Praise) and younger American independents (including Julian Goldberger with Trans).

Feinstein also organized a panel, on which I sat, concerning the current economics of international film production. With Kate Ogborn of the British Film Institute, Praise producer Martha Coleman, Turkish producer Behrooz Hashemian (Journey to the Sun), and Slovenia’s E-Motion Films head Daniel Hocevar, the panel began with each of us describing how films are financed in our respective countries. Yet as the panel progressed, it turned into a fascinating discussion between the panelists and audience members – and, in many cases, among the audience members themselves. Formerly, Bosnian film was supported by a state funding agency and local television, as is the case in most European countries. However, film financing has been virtually halted after the war. Accordingly, one audience member suggested that Western governments participate in the rebuilding of the Bosnian film industry, a proposal that the panelists collectively thought to be impractical and unrealistic. And at one point, a young film student who had travelled to Sarajevo from Belgrade asked the panel what could be done to rebuild the Serbian film industry, which itself has been decimated by Milosevic’s economic policies. Hashemian and I both countered with tales of low-budget production in Turkey and the U.S. – the only two countries represented on the panel without state support for motion picture production. Hashemian went on to admonish filmmakers in the audience to research and participate in international funding ventures, such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund, that would surely be interested in funding young Bosnian talent. With the Festival’s regional program consisting mainly of Eastern European work and the Bosnia section containing retrospective programming, it is clear that the Bosnian film industry is caught between its old methods of production, which is unlikely to return in the near future, and the embracing of newer low-budget forms, such as digital video production or Internet distribution.

The other section at the Festival that was of interest to American independents was "New Currents," curated by the Berlin-based French producer and sales agent Phillipe Bober. Bober, who also produced this year’s Rotterdam winner, Suzhou River, runs the Coproduction Office, a company that sells and finances an exceptional range of innovative work. He has been involved with the Festival for years, and his program sits to the left of Feinstein’s, emphasizing some auteur cinema (such as Bruno Dumont’s Cannes-winner, Humanity) as well as more experimental work, such as December, 1-31, a diary film by Germany’s Jan Peters, in which each of its daily chapters is defined solely by the length of the film reel. Other films in this section included Laetitia Masson’s À Vendre and Shinya Tsukamoto’s Bullet Ballet.

At the screenings I attended, audiences were large and engaged, and the city itself, with its mixture of European and Muslim influences, bustled with signs of life just now returning to normal. Reminders of the war are everywhere in Sarajevo – many buildings are still scarred – but the street behind my hotel was packed every night with young people, and full restaurants and bars. And the Festival is as focused on its guests’ understanding of the region as it is in making sure you get to screenings. Long trips were organized daily to towns like Mostar, the location of a famous Muslim-Croat battle, and to various historical resistance sites within Sarajevo. I only spent a few days in Sarajevo, but I found that even a short trip to this city promotes a political understanding about the region unobtainable in the Western press. And, given its intelligent programming, exceedingly friendly and helpful staff, and enthusiastic, film-literate audiences (I was surprised when one attendee told me that she had rented Gummo on Bosnian home video), Sarajevo is a recommended stop for independents on the festival circuit. – Scott Macaulay



 
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