This is a copy paste of a text from the website of the festival, written by Maša Markovic, the programme manager of the Dealing with the Past project of the Sarajevo FF supported by the Robert Bosch Stiftung:

In 1991, Christian Würtenberg, a 26-year-old reporter from Switzerland and the protagonist of Anja Kofmel’s feature-length debut CHRIS THE SWISS, took a train from his hometown to war-torn Yugoslavia. In his diary, he noted that the sense of war became noticeable with every passing mile. “With each stop,” he wrote, “the train empties out a little more, until only a few shady characters remain.”

More than two decades later, it feels as though we are still on that same ride – except that now, with every stop, the train gets more crowded. The seats

are occupied by human-rights organisations, lawyers, politicians, those directly afflicted by war, and many others who are still trying to cope with the perplexing legacy of the Yugoslav conflicts. Walking in the aisles are also filmmakers, regional and international, who use the possibilities of cinema to open up space where these various, sometimes contradictory voices and experiences, can be reflected upon, debated, and, above all, heard.

Such a polyphony of voices is exactly what we encourage with the Dealing with the Past programme, a selection of recent films that tackle painful events of recent history. The subjects they explore are different, as are their aesthetic approaches. Investigative documentary, animation, theatre that crashes through the fourth wall, and reality-based fiction are used to confront viewers with unsolved war crimes, ethnic hatred, resurgent nationalism, and many wounds that have yet to heal. This year, the programme has expanded to include experiences of facing up to the past in countries like Romania and Slovakia, ranging in time from World War II to the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia.

In addition to this film programme, the Sarajevo Film Festival is for the third time organising the True Stories Market, a unique event that connects filmmakers with organisations that document and research the Yugoslav Wars. Five stories from the period will be presented during CineLink Industry Days; in order to facilitate their transition from the market to the screen, after the Festival an open call will invite filmmakers to apply to execute a project inspired by one of them. The Heartefact Fund will award a €3,000 grant to support further research.

The films selected for Dealing with the Past had their premieres at prestigious film festivals, and, in addition to critical acclaim, they won prizes ranging from Best Film (I DO NOT CARE IF WE GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS BARBARIANS at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and THE OTHER SIDE OF EVERYTHING at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam) to special mentions (SRBENKA at Visions du réel). Such prestige proves that these stories can cross regional borders, and incite emotion and spark conversation among wider audiences. With this in mind, the Sarajevo Film Festival has teamed up with the International Film Festival Rotterdam and its IFFR Live initiative, which will enable cinema-lovers in 15 cities across Europe to simultaneously enjoy the opening screening of Dealing with the Past. And what better film than CHRIS THE SWISS to take audiences on an investigative and heartbreaking journey to confront the past and its ghosts, which still haunt us in their search for understanding and reconciliation.

In 1991, Christian Wurtenberg, a 26-year-old reporter from Switzerland and the protagonist of Anja Kofmel’s feature-length debut CHRIS THE SWISS, took a train from his hometown to war-torn Yugoslavia. In his diary, he noted that the sense of war became noticeable with every passing mile. “With each stop,” he wrote, “the train empties out a little more, until only a few shady characters remain.”

More than two decades later, it feels as though we are still on that same ride – except that now, with every stop, the train gets more crowded. The seats are occupied by human-rights organisations, lawyers, politicians, those directly afflicted by war, and many others who are still trying to cope with the perplexing legacy of the Yugoslav conflicts. Walking in the aisles are also filmmakers, regional and international, who use the possibilities of cinema to open up space where these various, sometimes contradictory voices and experiences, can be reflected upon, debated, and, above all, heard.

Such a polyphony of voices is exactly what we encourage with the Dealing with the Past programme, a selection of recent films that tackle painful events of recent history. The subjects they explore are different, as are their aesthetic approaches. Investigative documentary, animation, theatre that crashes through the fourth wall, and reality-based fiction are used to confront viewers with unsolved war crimes, ethnic hatred, resurgent nationalism, and many wounds that have yet to heal. This year, the programme has expanded to include experiences of facing up to the past in countries like Romania and Slovakia, ranging in time from World War II to the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia.

In addition to this film programme, the Sarajevo Film Festival is for the third time organising the True Stories Market, a unique event that connects filmmakers with organisations that document and research the Yugoslav Wars. Five stories from the period will be presented during CineLink Industry Days; in order to facilitate their transition from the market to the screen, after the Festival an open call will invite filmmakers to apply to execute a project inspired by one of them. The Heartefact Fund will award a €3,000 grant to support further research.

The films selected for Dealing with the Past had their premieres at prestigious film festivals, and, in addition to critical acclaim, they won prizes ranging from Best Film (I DO NOT CARE IF WE GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS BARBARIANS at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and THE OTHER SIDE OF EVERYTHING at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam) to special mentions (SRBENKA at Visions du réel). Such prestige proves that these stories can cross regional borders, and incite emotion and spark conversation among wider audiences. With this in mind, the Sarajevo Film Festival has teamed up with the International Film Festival Rotterdam and its IFFR Live initiative, which will enable cinema-lovers in 15 cities across Europe to simultaneously enjoy the opening screening of Dealing with the Past. And what better film than CHRIS THE SWISS (PHOTO) to take audiences on an investigative and heartbreaking journey to confront the past and its ghosts, which still haunt us in their search for understanding and reconciliation.

https://www.sff.ba/en

Oh, it’s lovely this short film by veteran Momir Matovic from Montenegro. A 22 minutes love declaration to a small group of people somewhere in his country with the vehicle TAM 4500 as the car that transports kid(s) to school, goods to the grocer, flour to the old woman, hay to the younger woman, wood for heating in winter to the man. Risto is the name of the driver, who tells us that the car is 65 years old and that he has been having it for decades, helping the others and never himself. You believe him in this gem of a film that has dialogues the director has asked them to say – life philosophy at the purest – reminds me so much of early documentaries by Danish Jon Bang Carlsen, it’s the same kind of love to people, who normally do not appear in the media, a love expressed through images and the small story. Absolutely the same as seen before in films by Matovic, do you remember “Meters of Life”, the one about the old deaf mute man, who leaves his home to walk long down to the cinema to watch films in a very interactive manner.

Dear festival people all over, show this film, your audience will love it, it shows hard life with a big heart.

I have met Matovic a couple of times, hope to see him in Sarajevo, to say hvala to him and maybe drink a glass of Montenegrin Vranac with him.

Montenegro, 2018, 23 mins.

… and a review of the third film praised by Sarajevo FF documentary programmer, Rada Sesic who in her catalogue foreword writes: … The debut feature length film by Serbian new talent Senka Domanovic, Occupied Cinema, with which we open our Competition section, succeeds so well to show not only the drama of the months-long protests against the closing of the oldest Belgrade cinema but to reflect the temperature of the society, especially among the urban young population…

I agree with the programmer, it’s a powerful film that makes me sad and (a

bit) optimistic at the same time. Sad because the occupation ends with a split up among the occupants, a broken dream, optimistic because all that positive energy must not disappear, if political changes should happen in Serbia or am I now the naïve outsider, who has visited Belgrade once per year since year 2000 listening to friends describing the current situation as hopeless, watching Mila Turajlic’s great “The Other Side of Everything” and seeing how privatization is being performed as it so strongly is demonstrated in “Occupied Cinema”.

A good documentary needs several layers and a clear storytelling structure. Domanović, in this first long documentary, masters both, together with the cinematographer Sinisa Dugonjic and Mina Nenadovic, the editor. It is observational cinema, mixed with interviews and comments by some of the activists – those from the “occupied cinema movement” and those, who are activists, including workers from the Beograd Film that owned this and around 10 other cinemas in the city before they were privatized, sold to businessman Divanovic, who in the film via a phone contact says that he can do nothing as the tax authorities have closed his business – after he was in prison for corruption, if I got it right.

Never mind… the film, “occupation in 4 chapters”, shows the enthusiasm among the occupiers from the beginning, where there were people sleeping on location, where a film by Mina Djukic (photo) were shown as the first, where concerts were held, where two meeting rooms were organized and the endless discussions started about what the cinema should be, for films only, for cultural activities including production, and who should be the target audience?

Zvezda is the name of the downtown Belgrade cinema, it means Star, and there are wonderful small clips from the time where the cinema worked, with an outdoor cinema on the roof, Jean-Paul Belmondo was there, on film, “A Bout de Souffle”, a poster on the wall says so. We need to have self-management but how, “time for a vision” is the title for the second chapter, it goes in the direction of chaos, one says “there was a lot of energy… but we didn’t learn how to manage it”, and the film shows that, leading to (title of third chapter) division and yet there is still time for celebration of 100 days of occupation – and later of the one year in the final chapter that carries the question “where is the revolution” including a clip from the selling of the classic Yugoslav Avala Studios and its assets – 200 feature films and 400 documentaries!… So well described in Mila Turajlic’s “Cinema Komunisto”.

For one who is old enough to remember 1968 and similar actions that ended up in division as well, because of ideology, there is lot to recognize, the film has definitely a universal appeal because it is so well made and shows in a fine way the will and effort to change and how the young activists succeeded to make a cinema with a lot of activities – and how the energy and solidarity did not sustain. Put in the perspective of a country that invites any kind of capitalistic investments to happen. As in so many other countries… 

Serbia, 2018, 87 mins.

I made the decision to take a look at the three documentaries praised for their editing by Sarajevo FF programmer Rada Sesic. After “Srbrenka” here comes my comments to “4 Years In 10 Minutes”. Sesic wrote this:  

“Mladen Kovacevic… is lucidly experimenting with someone else’s quite personal amateur footage and is confronting the audience with the notion of life and death.”

She refers to the material brought back from a Mount Everest expedition by Dragan Jacimovic, who reached the top in May 2000. It is amateur footage of quite bad quality and it is quotes from the diary of the climber, personal reflections the whole way through, put on the screen so it covers the whole picture. Again and again, quite a disturbing and boring cinematic decision, I have to confess was my impression until we get to the top with Jacimovic 36 mins. into the film, where we are with him, who is alone with no one to share his success and with huge problems in breathing. He shows the Yugoslav and Serbian flag and one from a sponsor I guess, “I am spitting blood”, 4 years in 10 minutes. This is where the film lives, were the viewer is invited to be present.

And then he has to hurry to go down again to get oxygen and his texts on the screen explain about hallucinations and about being unconscious; there is no pride in the texts it’s about life and death as Rada Sesic wrote.

The film was awarded as the best Serbian documentary at the Beldocs festival in Belgrade and it was premiered at Visions du Réel.

Serbia, 2018, 63 mins.

The festival that starts August 10 and continues until August 17 has again this year an impressive competition programme put together, again, and of course, by Rada Sesic, who is also the mastermind (together with Martichka Bozhilova) behind the Rough Cut Boutique for projects close to be finished. Many of which when finished ends up in the competition.

16 films have been selected, among them a handful of shorts.

I have taken a quote from Rada Sesic’s introduction to the film program – here it is, and I will before the festival review the three films mentioned, the first one to be “Srbenka”:

… In some way, this year’s selection also celebrates the importance of creative editing. Obviously, the editing process is crucial for many documentaries for finding the narrative and establishing the proper rhythm for a particular narrative, however, this year we have several films that are exactly thought through and created during that stage. One of those is the brilliantly edited and through editing smartly directed Srbenka (Photo) by Croatian maker Nebojsa Slijepcevic that participated at the Docu Rough Cut Boutique last year in Sarajevo. Similarly, films that are done from loads of material as the result of a long process of following an event certainly require a miraculous editor. The debut feature length film by Serbian new talent Senka Domanovic, Occupied Cinema, with which we open our Competition section, succeeded so well to show not only the drama of the months-long protests against the closing of the oldest Belgrade cinema but to reflect the temperature of the society, especially among the urban young population. Another Serbian maker who is daringly challenging different documentary textures in each new film and regularly gets recognition at the European film scene, is Mladen Kovacevic. In his 4 years in 10 minutes, he is lucidly experimenting with someone else’s quite personal amateur footage and is confronting the audience with the notion of life and death.

https://www.sff.ba/en/news/10819/competition-programme-documentary-film-2018

I can only echo what Sarajevo FF documentary programmer Rada Sesic writes above about this film that has already won the DocAlliance Award, announced it was in Cannes: … brilliantly edited and through editing smartly directed…

Background for the film and the theatre play that is followed, taken from the production company’s website:

“In the winter of 1991. a 12-year old Serbian girl (Aleksandra Zec) was murdered in Zagreb. A quarter of century later director Oliver Frljić is working on a theatre play about the case. Rehearsals become a collective psychotherapy, and the 12-year old actress Nina feels as if the war had never ended.”

It’s done many times before, it’s difficult, it demands a clever director and editor, and an interesting theatre play director. Oliver Frljić is one, it is fascinating to follow how he works with the actors, how they involve their own experiences in a post-war Croatia, were nationalism is strong and where right-wing media objected to the play: When will Croatian kids (killed in the war) get a theatre play. Frljić is harassed and wants his actors to react to the criticism of the play in the media. They don’t because “then we’re giving them space, they don´t deserve”.

The film lives because of the excellent cinematography, the many close-ups of the 12 year old Nina, and because of the director and his emotions, and the many voice-offs are given beautiful space with images from an empty stage. An intense film with a tone, and a distance via the theatre play, an invitation to reflection. 

http://restarted.hr/en/movies.php?recordID=163

Croatia, 2018, 72 mins.

Three important film festivals in August in the Balkan region. I have visited them all, in Sarajevo, Skopje (Makedox) and Dokufest. Will present them all on this site, with pleasure, the one in Sarajevo on location.

But first Dokufest in Kosovo, that starts August 3 and runs until August 11 with a variety of great offers to those, who come to the cosy Prizren. And – take a look at the program and its sections – a festival that can inspire

others, when it comes to originality. What about 21 films in “Birth of a Nation: Focus on Taiwan” or “Materials, Structures, Forms: Experimental Films, made by Women” or “Between My Flesh and the World’s Fingers”, a series of 8 films curated by critic and programmer Pamela Cohn?

The festival screens film outside at night, followed by concerts, there are panel discussions, talks and masterclasses, photo exhibitions, films for children, VR, a lab…

… and of course (6) competition sections. also for short films. “Balkan Dox”, “Green” Dox”, “Human Rights” etc. In the “International Dox” you find “Sleep has Her House” (PHOTO) by Scott Barley, a film that I still carry in my mind after I saw it in Belgrade in June, masterpiece!

http://dokufest.com/program/categories/

Docs at Venice International FF. The festival (29/8-08/9) announced its program yesterday and I went to search documentaries in the “Out of Competition” section, where they are placed.

Ten titles – as the festival puts it – by established directors: Amos Gitai, Victor Kosakovsky, Emir Kusturica, Sergei Loznitsa, Ron Mann, Francesca Mannocchi & Alessio Romenzi, Errol Morris, Giorgio Treves, Tsai Ming-Liang and Frederick Wiseman.

From the latter, the 88 year old American master of observational documentary, comes “Monrovia, Indiana”, 2 hours and 23 minutes, I stole this description from the internet:

“Located in mid-America, MONROVIA, INDIANA, (population 1400), founded in 1812, is primarily a farming community. The film is about the day-to-day experiences living and working in Monrovia, with emphasis on community organizations and institutions, religion and daily life in this farming community.”

Errol Morris goes to Venice with “American Dharma” – no description but the fact that Steve Bannon (!!!) is the character. Very actual, indeed.

Sergei Loznitsa is there with his third film from this year, “Process”, referring to the Stalinist processes in the 1930’es. I met Loznitsa in Krakow this year, where he told me about this film, with great enthusiasm, having found footage never shown before, “that will change history”, he said!

And… the cherry on the cake, after years of waiting for a new film by wonderful Victor Kossakovsky, “Aquarela” (PHOTO) is ready, 89 minutes, a film that contrary to the other I have mentioned, have been extensively written about, mostly on social media – I have taken the description from British Council:

Aquarela’ takes audiences on a deeply cinematic journey through the transformative beauty and raw power of water. Filmed at a rare 96 frames-per-second, the film is a visceral wake-up call that humans are no match for the sheer force and capricious will of Earth’s most precious element. From the precarious frozen waters of Russia’s Lake Baikal to Miami in the throes of Hurricane Irma to Venezuela’s mighty Angels Falls, water is ‘Aquarela’s’ main character, with director Victor Kossakovsky capturing her many personalities in startling visual detail.

http://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2018/lineup/out-competition

It’s a scoop for the DOK Leipzig festival, edition 61 (!) to have “Meeting Gorbachev” as the opening film on the 29^th of October.

And to have Werner Herzog present to talk about the film and attend screenings of 

other works, that carry his signature.

In the proud press release it is written about the film:

“With “Meeting Gorbachev”, Werner Herzog and André Singer have painted a human portrait of one of the most important politicians of the past century. Who is the man that brought the Cold War to an end? Through Mikhail Gorbachev, the world changed significantly and yet he remains a great enigma as a human being. From his humble beginnings as the son of a farmer, Gorbachev worked his way up to the post of President of the Soviet Union and shook the nation to its foundations in a time where there appeared to be no resolution to the conflict between East and West. In the film, Herzog and Gorbachev sit together in the former’s Moscow office, engaging in intense conversations about the past and the winding path of history. Time and again their attention returns to the reunification of Germany. The two men treat the difficulties and successes that the former President of the USSR was met with during his tenure. Gorbachev also speaks very openly about the mistakes that he made at the time, about decisions that he might approach differently from today’s perspective. However, the film also deals with the present and future as well, treating questions like: Why is the political situation in both the USA and Russia so difficult at the moment? “Meeting Gorbachev” aims to provide answers for the generations that witnessed and experienced Gorbachev’s policies and their effects first-hand, but also for young individuals who now find themselves living in another reality and are only familiar with the Cold War from history books and stories…”

https://www.dok-leipzig.de/en/