8th Sarajevo Film Festival 2002

Every cinéaste has a favorite film festival he likes to visit just for the sheer pleasure of being there ­ without having to pay that much attention to the ridiculous squabble over first rights to world premieres or whether or not a film print will arrive in time from its last stop somewhere in the Far East. In fact, festival chaos can help considerably to make suffering through pretentious, overblown, mediocre film-fare that much more bearable. I still remember that seven-hour ride in a UN-jeep from Zagreb to Sarajevo to attend the 2nd Sarajevo Film Festival in September of 1996. Miro Purivatra was running on a shoestring grant from the Soros Foundation. Bosnian director Ademir Kenovic and poet Abdullah Sidran were working on a script for The Perfect Circle, which a year later would open the Directors Fortnight at Cannes. Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves was awarded the Anno Zero Prize ­ after narrowly missing the top honor in Cannes. Our applause at Sarajevo was more heart-felt anyway!

        Six years later I was back in Sarajevo for the fifth time. Things hadn’t changed much over the years. There were still a half-dozen potpourri sections ­ Regional Films, Panorama, New Currents, Open-Air Hits, a Tribute to Mike Leigh, and a brace of local SAGA shorts ­ some slapped together by visiting programmers who knew the tastes of a discerning public: Aki Kaurismäki’s The Man Without a Past (Finland), Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten (Iran), Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (USA), Russian Ark (Russia/Germany), Fatmir Koci’s Tirana Year Zero (Albania), Kornel Mundruczo’s Pleasant Days (Hungary), Sinisa Dragan’s Every Day God Kisses Us on the Mouth< (Romania), Artur Aristakisyan’s A Place on Earth (Russia), Luiz Fernando Cavalho’s To the Left of the Father (Brazil), and a pair of award-winning shorts: Ahmed Imanovic’s Ten Minutes (Bosnia) and Stefan Arsenijevic’s (a)torzija (Slovenia).

        Just as the festival was about to close, the first print of a new Bosnian film production arrived from the lab: Dino Mustafic’s Remake ­ a third masterful film on Bosnia and Sarajevo after Ademir Kenovic’s The Perfect Circle and Danis Tanovic’s No Man’s Land (2001). Don’t miss it!

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