I was there last year for this gem of a festival for creatice documentaries. It is done with a very personal touch by the couple Petra Seliskar and Brand Ferro. It’s primarily an outdoor screening festival – the weather invites you to share beautiful evenings at the amazing Kurshumli An in the old city – with indoor workshops; this year they had two top names to deal with the theme “Directing Reality”: Finnish Pirjo Honkasalo and Polish Wojciech Staron.

If you google Makedox, you will see many clips from the workshops and small talks with filmmakers, who participated like Boris Mitic (In Praise of Nothing), Marta Prus (Over the Limit) (there was a fine focus on Polish documentaries) and Simon Lereng Wilmont. whose “The Distant Barking of Dogs” won the main award in the Main Selection. Not the first award for Wilmont and his film – with another multi-awarded film “Of Fathers and Sons” by Talal Derki getting a special mention from a jury that consisted of Honkasalo, Staron and Mariam Chachia, young talented director from Georgia.

There were many other sections and juries and awards, let me mention one, the best short film: Heba Khaled’s content-wise terrible, stylistically overwhelmingly strong “People of the Wasteland” that has the following description “Using  footage filmed and gathered during more than two years through a GoPro camera placed on the heads of different Syrian fighters in the enemy region, the film presents the violence, the horrors and the absurdity of war in a first-perspective point-of-view. In the chaos of war, the lines between good and evil become blurred and the location is intentionally left unclear to remind us that war affects us all, not only Syrians.”

I have seen the film, have to see it again, shocking reality!

http://makedox.mk/mk/en/

Would have loved to be in beautiful St. Petersburg again for the festival Message to Man, that I have visited many times. The dates are September 15-22 and I am “anderswo engagiert” .

The festival has a huge program – if you are on FB with it you are bombarded with news every day – and there are many interesting films in the competitive sections, of which there are no less than 6: International Full-Length documentary Films, Short Docs, Short Fiction, Short Animated, National Competition of Docs and the In Silico Experimental Short Film Competition.

Let me mention some of the films: The controversial “The White World According to Daliborek” by Vit Klusák, the super-productive master Sergei Loznitsa has his “Victory Day” in competition, Romanian “Infinite football” (PHOTO) by Corneliu Porumboiu is there (will there be played football as in Tbilisi and other festivals thanks to tireless main character Laurentiu Ginghina?), Bernadett Tuza-Ritter’s “A Woman Captured” that is and deserves to be everywhere, Wang Bing is there with “Mrs Fang”… in the national competition I am curious to see what talented Tatyana Soboleva comes with, “Uncle Sasha, or One Flew Over Russia” is the title as well as the film by Alina Rudnitskaya (together with Sergey Vinokurov) “Fatei and the Sea”… and In Silico presents a new work by former students of Zelig Film School in Bolzano, Mark Olexa and Francesca Scalisi, “Black Line”.

https://message2man.com/en/

Happy to say that I agree with the competent decisions made by this jury: Leena Pasanen (Festival Director of DOK Leipzig, Germany), Luciano Rigolini (Artist-photographer, producer, Switzerland), Marina Gumzi (Producer/ Scriptwriter, Slovenia). I give you the links for the reviews I made during the festival 

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST DOCUMENTARY FILM

SRBENKA

Director: Nebojša Slijepčević 

Croatia 

Financial award, in the amount of 3,000 €, sponsored by Government of Switzerland.

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4308/

SPECIAL JURY MENTION

NINE MONTH WAR/ KILENC HÓNAP HÁBORÚ

Director: László Csuja 

Hungary, Qatar

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4315/

HUMAN RIGHTS AWARD

ARAF (PHOTO)

Turkey, Greece, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Director: Didem Pekün 

Best film of the Competition Programme – Documentary Film dealing with the subject of human rights. Award in the amount of 3,000 €, sponsored by Government of Switzerland.

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4316/

Here comes a copy-paste of the press release from Jihlava FF. The presentation of the projects took place at the same conference room in Hotel Europe as the Rough Cut Boutique, this time, good for the presenters, they were in spotlight, it helped to create some passion from the very diverse group of people, who were selected by Marek Hovorka and his festival team. I was a member of the jury, so no personal comments would be fair. Here comes the text:

“Ten outstanding documentaries from Central and Eastern Europe, planned for theatrical release during the upcoming 12 months – the Docu Talents from the East –  were presented yesterday at the Sarajevo Film Festival.

Projects from Azerbaijan, Belarus, Czech Republic, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine made it to the final selection of Docu Talents from the East 2018.

The Docu Talent Award was newly granted to the most promising projects. The international jury selected two winners: An absurd tragicomical Ukrainian-Belarussian documentary placed in today’s Crimea My Granny from Mars directed by Alexandar Mihalkovich and produced by Volia Chajkouskaya, and an intimate artistic documentary film Birthday directed and produced by Hilal Baydarov from Azerbaijan. The awards are accompanied with financial prize 2,500 USD for each project, in cooperation with the festival’s partner Current Time TV.

The jury gave the following statements:

“For a choice of charismatic protagonists, treated in a highly cinematic way, and for the sense of absurdity in a difficult and unstable environment.”
 

(My Granny from Mars)

 (PHOTO)

“To a new voice that reveals a pure sense of time, by capturing the universal nature of reality.”

(Birthday)

http://www.dokument-festival.com/industry/docu-talents/2018

Yesterday morning the Rough Cut Boutique presented the five projects that under the leadership of Rada Sesic and Martichka Bozhilova were developed with the tutorial help of people like editor Tom Ernst, producer Stefano Tealdi, commissioning editor Hanka Kastelicova, Katrine Kilgaard from CPH:DOX, Aleksandra Derewienko from Cat&Docs in Paris, Jenny Westergaard from YLE Finland and others.

The presentation took place at a conference room of Hotel Europe, not the best place as the presenters were standing in almost total darkness, no spotlight on them, which made the atmosphere a bit sleepy. The verbal presentation (I was told that they were trained in pitching, sorry could not see that) was followed by clips/scenes from the rough cuts. Have to confess that it is difficult to get a true impression of a film from the visual material.

There were awards for the best projects. They went like this:

– 20.000 EUR postproduction award by Digital Cube Romania: DAUGHTER OF CAMORRA, Siniša Gačić

– IDFA Award – the winner will be fully invited to IDFA 2018: DIARY OF A SERIOUS OFFENDER, Danilo Ceković

– HBO Europe Award – 2000 EUR: DAUGHTER OF CAMORRA, Siniša Gačić

– CAT&Docs Award  – 2000 EUR: THE MAGIC LIFE OF V, Tonislav Hristov

– DOK Preview at DOK Leipzig 2018 and visit to the Festival and presentation: ONE OF US, Đuro Gavran

There was a big quality difference among the five with the Finnish/Bulgarian collaboration (Kaarle Aho and Tonislav Hristov) on a high professional level (superb camera work), whereas the others were beginners or less experienced.

Luckily there was a guest project that I knew about from way back, a film – again – dealing with the past, “Aktion DB” (PHOTO); Dana Budisavljevic is the director who pitched together with producer Miljenka Cogelja. An extraordinary story about an extraordinary woman Diana Budisavljevic, who during WW2 helped children and women out of the concentration camps set up by the Germans and their Croatian partners, the Ustashas. It’s 10000 children and the film is a docufiction using an actress to play DB, sequences with survivors who go the places, where the camps were and shocking archive material from the camps. The director has – from the scenes I saw – found her form, she has made her aesthetic choice, b/w and colour mixed, the b/w maybe tinted a bit, it looked impressive.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Hulahop+films&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b

There he was on screen and in persona among the audience, 22 year old Amir Śeśic, whose story was presented by Mirna Buljugic from BIRN, that stands for Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. And what a story: Amir has never seen his father, who was one of the victims of the Srebrenica massacre in 1995. When he was 3 months old, his mother left him, he grew up in an orphanage, was with a new family, fought to understand what a mother could be, does not want to have anything to do with his own mother AND has written a book.

It took me 2 years to write it, he said, the young energetic man, who is now going around launching the book, that many at the presentation done by Mirna Buljugic told him to make in an English version as well. Buljugic told us that the book is a very emotional experience, describing also what the stay in the orphanage meant for Amir, who regularly visits his father’s grave in Srebrenica.

http://birn.eu.com/network/birn-bosnia-and-herzegovina/

Back in Copenhagen. Thinking of the many documentary adventures I take with me from the Sarajevo Film Festival. To be part of the training team of representatives from ngo’s and human rights organizations was the experience for me. Engaged, committed people who every day deal with human beings who suffer from the consequences of the wars in the 1990’es – and try to help them. Respect!

In an article by Vladan Petkovic for Screen Daily, link below, the stories delivered to a full hall Monday afternoon at the Hotel Europe are described. Read that and let me introduce the panel on the photo:

From right colleague tutor and here moderator Robert Zuber and on stage Goran Zoric, Edin Ramulic, Mediha Haskic who translated for Edin, Augustina Rahmanovic, Sabiha Husic and Mirna Buljugic.

https://www.screendaily.com/news/sarajevos-true-stories-market-opens-competition-for-producers/5131637.article