Sarajevo hosts an amazing film festival. The variety of programs and projects is overwhelming. Films in many cinemas, discussions and presentations after the screenings, and in the Hotel Europe where workshops take place and the Atrium has full houses for presentations linked to industry matters.

I am happy to say that documentaries have a visible and important place in

the festival. I have already reviewed some of the films in the competition before the festival, now I have had the chance to be in the cinema for film screenings of some of the films that have been included in the “Dealing With the Past” section of the festival.

Full house for the screening of “The Other Side of Everything” by Mila Turajlic, with a short discussion after the film with producer Carine Chichkowsky and HBO’s Hanka Kastelicovà, in the absence of the director, who had to stay in Belgrade because of illness. The film has been written about many times on this site, here is one link http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4096/

And full house for “Chris, the Swiss” by Anja Kofmel with Sinisa Juricic as co-producer and character in a film that I can only characterize as a masterpiece. The story about the Swiss journalist, who goes to Yugoslavia to cover the war and ends up being killed, when he joins a paramilitary group with the ambition to get material for a book. The screening was transmitted, in collaboration with the Rotterdam IFF, to 8 places in neighbouring countries with Q&A with Anja Kofmel and Sinisa Juricic, led by my tutor colleague Robert Zuber from the “Dealing With the Past”. The film is a superb example of how you can connect animation (the director is animator) with interviews, archive material from the war and footage of the wo going around to the places, where “it” happened. I had seen it before on my computer, it is a total different experience to sit in a full cinema – the music, the sound score.

And full house for Nebojsa Slijepcevic and his “Srbenka”, where I had the pleasure to lead the discussion after the film, more than half an hour, and I dare say that the film was well received by the audience. My review can be read on http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4308/

The film had the regional premiere here in Sarajevo and it was obvious to ask the director: What will happen when the film is premiered in cinemas in Croatia – will it raise tensions as did the theatre play did when it was performed in Rijeka in Croatia. Let’s see, the director answered. The film is a piece of art, so well put together, so many interesting cinematic solutions, and because of that the story about being a Serb in Croatia is so touching and thought-provoking. It is universal, I was thinking, easy to refer it to how it must be to be a muslim in Denmark today. And it is about theatre, what an interesting director Oliver Frljic is, and a very controversial character in his home country, a provocateur some called him at the screening.

And full house for “Occupation” (review on http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4300/), the omnibus film, where the Polish director Magdalena Szymkow and Hungarian producer Ágnes Horváth-Szabó took part in the Q&A. Szymkow told the audience how she started with archive material from the music festival where many artists left as a protest against the invasion by the Warsaw Pact countries and then found the love story that made the title of the film appear, “I’m Writing to You My Love”.

Four strong films, all well received, by an audience, mostly young people; there is hope for creative documentaries as long as there is an attendance as here.

https://www.sff.ba/novost/10863/dealing-with-the-past

 

 

 

 

This is a copy paste of a text from the website of the Sarajevo Film Festival to show you a photo taken by the wonderful Turkish director:

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, one of today’s most acclaimed filmmakers, will receive the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo Award at the 24th Sarajevo Film Festival. Ceylan will receive the Award in recognition of outstanding contribution to the art of film and support of Sarajevo Film Festival. Ceylan is also the honorary guest of the 24th Sarajevo Film Festival’s Tribute to programme.

The opening of the exibition Nuri Bilge Ceylan: Turkey Cinemascope will be held on Saturday, 11th August 2018 at noon, in Art Galerry of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Ceylan’s photographs, just like his films, encourage the observer to think. They provide no obvious answers, but rather mere hints of emotion. The expressions on the faces of his subjects – both in film and in photography – are always ambivalent, reflecting the complexity of life and the human soul, and confirming Ceylan’s status as a talented narrator and a profoundly important and ethical artist.

https://www.sff.ba/en

Surprise me, give me something extraordinary, make the form important, challenge me, make me learn something new. This Turkish film, 45 minutes long, fulfilled the wishes of this old documentary addict. It has many layers and instead of me trying to give a summary of the content, here is the description from the filmmakers as I read it after watching the vimeo link:

Araf is an essayistic road movie and diary of a ghostly character, Nayia, who

travels between Srebrenica, Sarajevo, and Mostar in Bosnia. She has been in exile since the war and returns for the 22nd memorial of the Srebrenica genocide. The film is guided by her diary notes of the journey, which merge with the myth of Daedalus and Icarus – Icarus being the name given to the winner of a bridge diving competition in her home country. The story of Icarus and Daedalus, a myth symbolic of man’s over-ambition and inevitable failure, is woven throughout the film as a way to think about exorcizing the vicious cycle of such events happening in the future and of a possible reconciliation. Nayia also thinks of Icarus from a different perspective, that of seeing the optimism of such a leap, his braveness in taking a leap into the unknown in this era of radical instability, that perhaps Icarus wanted to write a different narrative. Araf thus traces these paradoxes through Nayia’s displacement and her return to her home country post-war – that of a constant terror and a permanent standstill, and the friction between displacement and permanence.

But film is a very concrete medium so let me try to describe the form, the aesthetic choices that the director has chosen to make the film so impressive as a Film. As Cinema. She works with a literary diary text – unfortunately, my only objection, sometimes with an English language that is difficult to understand – she has filmed in b/w, uses slow motion, uses a structure where she goes back to the jumper/diver/Icarus from the Mostar bridge to film that from all angles, creating a lyrical tone, ending up in Srebrenica where you watch the faces and hands and movements of the visitors in mourning. It goes with a beautiful choice of music and a sound score that is in perfect sync with the images. It is beautiful and emotional, when you hear the names mentioned of the victims of the massacre. As it is said “… 22 years after there are still tombs to be filled…”. There is also some sarcasm in the text, when you see a wall on which UN is written, “… they call UN United Nothing here…”

PS. I had to go to Wikipedia to get to know the meaning of the title “Araf”: A’raf (Arabic: الأعراف‎) is the Muslim separator realm or borderland between heaven and hell,^[1] inhabited by the people who are evenly balanced in their sins and virtues. This place may be described as a kind of beneficent purgatory with privation but without suffering. The word is literally translated as “The Heights” in English. The realm is described as a high curtain between hell and paradise.^[2] Ibn Kathir described A’raf as a wall that contains a gate.^[3] In this high wall lived people who witness the terror of hell and the beauty of paradise. They yearn to enter paradise, but their sins and virtues are evenly balanced. Yet with the mercy of God, they will be one of the last people to enter the paradise.

Turkey, 2017, 45 mins.

The film, that has its world premiere at the Sarajevo Film Festival August 14, is a psychological drama featuring a young man and his mother with the young man’s girlfriend as an important side-character. I wrote man but take a look at the picture, he is a playful boy, happy, full of life, in love with the girl, he wants to marry her, he belongs to the Hungarian minority in Ukraine, gets drafted and chooses to go with the Ukrainian army. Much against his mother’s wish. She is the one, who suffers, wants him to stay at home, is happy but worried, when he is home for leave and relieved, when he finally finishes his military duty. After nine months, a reborn child.

The playful boy becomes a disillusioned young man. And the film shows that, indeed it does show, what damage on the soul a war can do. Letting us viewers look at his face. Built up in a very simple way, the film is based on shootings from the family’s house in a village, and the cell phone material that Jani, the son, shoots, when sent to the war between Ukraine and Russia. A lot is the soldier’s life – fun, shooting his pals, and other’s is deadly serious footage from the combat zone in Eastern Ukraine. The story he tells about the pal who is killed next to him is what changes him completely. It sent him to hospital and made him strongly wanting to go home “missing mum”.

At home he is lying on the sofa watching the material he shot, he is bored and does not know, what to do with his life. It seems like he does not want to marry the girlfriend he proposed to nine months earlier – on camera.

The return of a soldier to normal life, there are loads of films dealing with this topic, fiction and documentary, however this one has an interesting character approach – mother and son/girlfriend – and a clever set-up with the two very different cinematic takes, with the calm observation of the family life in the village contrasting the nervous, hectic soldier life shot by the young boy turned man – that shifts from being just a funny boy-game to a question of life and death, leaving scars on the soul.

Hungary, 2018, 73 mins. 

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.