Sarajevo Film Festival

Wally Hammond examines this most unusual of film festivals.

Sep  6 2006

Sarajevo's Film Festival is famous for being instigated, towards the end of the bloody siege in 1994, as a wonderful, cultural act of defiance. Twelve years on, feeling the appetite, enthusiasm and adrenaline of its cinema audiences, you're left in no doubt that you're in a city where movies really matter. Even more than London's, this is a people's film festival. And given that Sarajevo's population is about the same as Coventry's (300,000 or so), the six-figure attendance for the nine-day-long festivities of the once-besieged capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina – the biggest such festival in south-east Europe – seems all the more extraordinary.

The Sarajevans make for a discerning, cine-literate audience. Presented with a varied programme – teen and children's strands, a documentary slot, an 'arthouse' panorama section, tributes to Abel Ferrara and Béla Tarr, sidebar panels, open-air screenings and recent Hollywood fare – their warmest acclaim (and the audience award) went to 'The Road to Guantánamo', attended by the Tipton Three.

I found the competition sections, reserved for films of Balkan origin, very strong in both the documentary and feature categories. Croatian Petar Krelja's 'My Neighbour Tanja' is an affectionate portrait of ordinary female indefatigability and changing times as it profiles his somewhat spikey, illegitimately born council-block neighbour; meanwhile Dzemal Sabic's 'Two Sisters' offers fascinating incidental insights into a vanishing rural culture as it documents the dutiful self-sacrifice of a 58-year-old woman who moves to the country to look after her ailing sister.

Best of the docs was Janko Baljak's incisive account of the events of 1991 in Croatia, 'Vukovar – Final Cut' (winner of the Human Rights award), which not only exhibited Baljak's skill as an interviewer, his balance, courage and confidence in tackling a red-raw subject, but also his ability to temper his sometimes shocking material through skilful editing. I'll remember the feeling of the audience's silence before the applause.

My colleagues have already highlighted Andrea Staka's tale of diasporan Bosnians in Switzerland ,'Das Fräulein', in our recent Locarno report. The powerful, skilfully restrained performance by Mirjana Karanovic (from Kusturica's 'Life Is a Miracle') as the quickened old maid in that film helped it garner the top prize, the Heart of Sarajevo, to add to its earlier Golden Leopard.

But Karanovic is arguably even better in one of the films in the excellent Regional strand, from another Bosnian woman director, jury head Jasmila Zbanic. In Zbanic's Berlin Golden Bear-winning 'Grbavica', Karanovic is a marvel as the struggling and fiercely protective mother of a querulous 12-year-girl. There was comedy too; the best, Jan Cvitkovic's Croatian-Slovenian co-production 'Gravehopping', features an exquisite turn by Gregor Bakovic as a funeral orator.

The section that gave me most pleasure, however, and that offers very encouraging signs for future Balkan film production, was the shorts competition. There were a dozen delights, from the textures of Turk Belma Bas's 'Boreas' to the threat of Hungarian Tamas Kemenyffy's 'Lucky Man'. Typifying the resourcefulness, accomplishment and economy of these short filmmakers was Mark Santic's concise, ironic and sad 'Good Luck Nedim', about two men turned back from the Slovenian border, which won Best Short.

The SFF has its long-term friends: Mike Leigh was specially honoured this year and Bono turned up to chaperone the locally admired but disconcertingly incomprehensible Nick Nolte for an open-air screening of the aptly titled but in fact pretty inappropriate gymnastics hooey 'Peaceful Warrior'. I think I made out correctly the words of the leonine one as he deflected criticism of his would-be inspirational movie the next day, 'I'm not here for the film, I'm here for you!' Yeah! Here's to you, Sarajevo.

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