FOCUS:

Back in September of 1996, the 2nd Sarajevo Film Festival looked quite different than it does today. Immediately after the four-year siege of Sarajevo (during which the 1st Sarajevo Film Festival had taken place in 1995 as an underground film-and-video event), festival founder and director Mirsad (Miro) Purivatra had only $30,000 to spend, thanks primarily to the generosity of the Soros »Open Society« Foundation. The 70 invited guests and journalists were mostly quartered in private homes. And in the Obala Open Air Arena an estimated audience of 2,500 applauded the presence of Vanessa Redgrave as she introduced Brian de Palma’s Operation Impossible. German director Romuald Karmakar was also present with Der Totmacher (The Death Maker), awarded in Venice just a few weeks before. The American Studios sent their latest action films, and for the children there was the European premiere of Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. As one of those visiting journalists, I can assure you that it was quite a show.

This year, for the 11th Sarajevo Film Festival (19-27 August 2005), Miro Purivatra had an estimated 2 Million Euros to spend — including, of course, generous input from some 50 sponsors. Of the 700 invited guests, 400 were listed as journalists and festival representatives. Altogether, SFF screened 182 films in 12 different sections: Regional Feature Film Competition, Regional Short Film Competition, Galas, Panorama, International Documentaries, Regional Documentaries, New Currents, Special Screenings, Retrospective Tribute to Alexander Payne, Teen Arena (Youth Films), Children Films, and the Cine-Link Script Development and Coproduction Market in the Balkans. In general, one can say that Sarajevo is now synonymous with cinema in Southeastern Europe — indeed, no other European festival serves the best interests of filmmakers in the Balkans, an area stretching from Hungary to Albania, from Slovenia to Romania.

By offering purse awards of 50,000 Euros, Sarajevo attracted top contenders for both Regional Competitions — for Best Feature Film and Best Short Film. Each day, the »SFF Daily« printed 20 pages of interviews, reviews, news, and information in both Bosnian and English. The nightly Meeting Point was open until the first rays of dawn. A video bar and a deck of computers were at the beckoned call of guests. Excursions were scheduled to Mostar (to see the restored bridge) and the city environs (to view the tunnel built under the airport during the siege). New hotels and restaurants in the Old Town made the stay even more pleasant. And Marco Müller, the director of the Venice film festival, took time out to attend the opening night gala and to receive an honorary festival award. Back in 1995, as the then director of the Locarno festival, Marco Müller had coordinated the transport of video cassettes through the tunnel to help launch the first Sarajevo festival.

As usual, the festival opened with a BH (Bosnia & Hercegovina) film production: Benjamin Filipovic’s Dobro ustimani mrtvaci (Well Tempered Corpses). A black comedy about four people who within the space of a few hours kick the bucket in the weirdest way, Well Tempered Corpses was three years in the making and well received by the home public in the spacious Obala Open Air Arena. For many the film reflected the absurdity of life today in a Sarajevo still recovering from a nightmarish dream. A doctor wants to get rid of his wife, the Minister of Finance in the government, because she has a habit of bringing her bureaucratic ways into the family household. A gay employee in a computer company can’t take the mobbing in the office, so he decides to jump off a roof. A loony inventor wants to construct a home-made airplane to fly on diesel, the idea being to fly the Atlantic to New York to see his daughter again, who had left Sarajevo during the siege. And a crazy locomotive engineer, who suffers a blackout every time he gets over-excited, hopes to receive a permit to run the aforementioned Finance Minister to operate a train service from a neighboring village to downtown Sarajevo. By a quirk of fate — the inventor’s rickety plane crashes on a busy street — all four end up in the morgue.

Eleven entries from eight filmlands — Bosnia, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria — competed for the Grand Prize as Best Regional Feature Film. Programmer Elma Tataragic announced that the addition of two out-of-competition entries from Greece and Turkey should be understood as blank cheques for both countries to join the official competition next year. The Grand Prize with its purse of $25,000 (donated by the BH Ministry of Culture and Sport) was awarded Georgi Djulgerov’s Leidi Zi (Lady Zee) (Bulgaria), a docu-drama about an orphaned girl who fights for her rightful place in society with the only weapon at hand: she is an expert markswoman on a shooting range. According to Djulgerov, approximately 35,000 children are living in 300 such institutions in Bulgaria today.

The Special Jury Prize was awarded to Isa Qosja’s Kukumi (Kukum) (Kosovo), a poetic film-metaphor on conditions in Kosovo. Set in an insane asylum in provincial Kosovo shortly after the war ended in 1999, the title refers to a gifted but eccentric flute-player, named Kukum (Luan Jaha), who along with two other companions sets out to discover the world. An off-camera commentary hints as to why Kukum was committed to the asylum in the first place: He says that he was cursed by an »enchantress« at birth when he wouldn't stop crying for three days. With NATO tanks roaming the countryside, plus a native populace that wants the »nuts« back in the asylum, it is only a question of a time before their luck runs out and tragedy strikes.

The Best Actress Prize was awarded to Zrinka Cvitesic for her comic role in Hrvoje Hribar’s Sto je muskarac bez brkova? (What Is a Man Without a Moustache?) (Croatia). Cvitesic plays a young widow in a provincial town, whose way of getting even with God and the community for leaving her stranded without a man or child is to go out and seduce the local Catholic priest. The Best Actor Prize went to Peter Musevski for his deft portrayal of a redundant mechanic in Damjan Kozole’s Delo osvobaja (Labour Equals Freedom) (Slovenia), a social drama about the whiplash in the job market after Slovenia joined the European Union. And the Prize for Best Regional Short Film was awarded to Balint Kenyeres’s Before Dawn (Hungary), a 13-minute fiction film without a cut about a foiled smuggling attempt to transport people illegally across a border. The shot begins in the middle of a waving wheat-field just before dawn, then follows the police-raid-action with a nonstop sweeping camera movement until an ironic twist is revealed at the end.

Ron Holloway