Seventh Sarajevo Film Festival

The story of Sarajevo Film Festival is, perforce, the history of the longest blockade of a city in modern times ­ lasting four years, from 1992 to 1996. In fact, the First Sarajevo Film Festival took place during the blockade itself ­ in the autumn of 1995. Thanks to the friendly support of Marco Müller, at that time the director of the Locarno festival, video cassettes and film copies donated by Locarno were carried into the besieged city on the backs of Bosnian patriots through a secret tunnel under the landing strip of the airport. Among these was Milcho Manchevski’s Before the Rain, a Macedonian coproduction that had been awarded the Golden Lion at the 1994 Venice festival. It dealt prophetically with the coming conflicts in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

       A year later, following the Dayton Agreement, festival director Mirsad Purivatra invited a handful of guests and journalists to attend the Second Sarajevo Film Festival in September of 1996. The festival’s ’Anno Zero’ Prize was awarded to Lars Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves. An overflow crowd of 2,500 in an open-air venue, a former schoolyard next to the Obala Art Centar, welcomed Vanessa Redgrave for the showing of Brian de Palma’s Operation Impossible. And Ademir Kenovic was editing The Perfect Circle, a Bosnian French coproduction about the blockade made in collaboration with poet-screenwriter Abdullah Sidran ­ the same poet-screenwriter who had previously collaborated with Emir Kusturica on Do You Remember Dolly Bell? (Opera Prima, Venice 1981) and When Father Was Away on a Business Trip (Golden Palm, Cannes 1984).

       Another year passed, and Mirsad Purivatra invited two »Sarajevo comedies« directed by pseudo intellectuals and backed by enterprising western European producers who had sensed an opportunity. Spanish director Gerardo Herrero’s Territorio Comanche, a competition entry at the 1997 Berlinale, was more of a laugh parade about »dangers to journalists« than about the siege and the sufferings of the population. Not much better was British director Michael Winterbottom’s Welcome to Sarajevo, a speculative rehash of well known TV documentation that was invited to compete at the 1997 Cannes festival. By contrast, Bosnian director Ademir Kenovic’s The Perfect Circle, which opened the Directors Fortnight at the same Cannes festival, came across as a real story about the real agonies of the people of Sarajevo. Where was Emir Kusturica, Sarajevo’s beloved native son? Throughout the blockade ­ from 2 May 1992 to 26 February 1996, during which 10,615 people were killed, among them 1,601 children, and circa 50,000 wounded ­ he stayed in Belgrade and Paris. While Sarajevo bled, he was working on Underground ­ to be awarded a second Golden Palm at the 1995 Cannes festival ­ and was seen on seen on Yugoslav television hobnobbing with Milosovic cronies. Although Underground was eventually screened in Sarajevo, Emir Kusturica has yet to return to the city, and it is doubtful whether he will in the foreseeable future.

       If there is a grain of truth in the soothsayer’s claim that one film can make a festival, then certainly it was Danis Tanovic’s No Man’s Land at the Seventh Sarajevo Film Festival (17 - 25 August 2001). When it opened the festival, an overflow crowd of 2,500 in the make-shift, open-air venue in a former schoolyard gave the film a standing ovation. Much the same happened when the film was screened a few weeks earlier at the Motovun festival in Croatia (where it was awarded the FIPRESCI Critics Prize). Some critics at Cannes argued that No Man’s Land (awarded Best Screenplay) arrived on the scene a decade too late. Others, however, felt that it was a natural progression of events in the Balkans, a black comedy made possible because of the wrenching films that preceded it: Ademir Kenovic’s The Perfect Circle (1997) and Goran Paskaljevic’s Balkan Powder Keg (1999). No one, however, would deny that Danis Tanovic had paid his dues. The Bosnian writer-director was a charter member of SAGA, the Sarajevo Group of Authors whose wartime documentation during the four-year siege of Sarajevo ­ under the collective title M-G-M (Man, God, Monster) (1994) ­ was invited to the Directors Fortnight at Cannes and paved the way for Bosnian colleague Ademir Kenovic’s The Perfect Circle. The SAGA Group had to scrape together funding to publish a black book titled »Sarajevo in War, 1992-1995, Filmography« (published in 1998), a listing of shorts, videos, and documentaries made during the siege. Most of this war documentation was made under the aegis of Danis Tanovic, who as head of the Bosnian Army’s Film Archive filmed over 300 hours of footage shot on the front lines that was later used in news reports broadcast around the world. One of these bears the enigmatic title »Portrait of the Artist in the War«.

       The siege over, Danis Tanovic transferred his filmmaking base to Belgium (L’Aube, 1997), where he set his wartime experiences down in a script titled No Man’s Land that was read by Belgium director Marion Hänsel and producer Marco Müller (a longtime Sarajevo supporter as director of the Locarno festival). Support flowed in from various European funding sources, and the film was shot as close to home as an insurance bond company would allow ­ in Slovenia. As the story goes, initial investments were recouped the day after the Cannes screening via deals made with The Sales Company. When I rather brashly asked Danis Tanovic whether he had benefitted financially from No Man’s Land, he stated his case unequivocally: »I’ve not left the festival since I arrived here for the opening night. Friends to visit and people want to talk. Do you know how many are still living in containers?«

        Visitors to this year’s festival were offered a rich selection of films to choose from. Under Mirsad Purivatra’s »umbrella system,« 14 separate sections were organized by guest curators from home and abroad. The Regional Program of new Balkan productions was programmed by Elma Tartaragic, the Panorama and Panorama Documentaries by New York Post critic Howard Feinstein, New Currents by Berlin-based French producer Philippe Bober, New Currents Shorts by Nicolas Schmerkins, Insert (an experimental and video program) by Amra Baksic, the Tribute to Stephen Frears and National Film and Television School (NFTS) screenings and workshops by Irena Taskovski, and a retrospective of »Partisan Westerns« directed by Sarajevo film pioneer Hajrudin »Siba« Krvavac by archivist Vesko Kadic.

Ronald Holloway