Bosnia:  welcome to Sarajevo

The Sarajevo Film Festival (SFF), which starts next week, began in 1995 as an artistic act of defiance against the war in Bosnia. About 15,000 people came to see the Bosnian premier of Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Pulp Fiction’ in a basement. It was said they dodged snipers to get there, and that explosions outside reinforced the violence on-screen.

Today, the festival is a symbol of the country’s recovery, as the largest in the region and one of the top ten in Europe. Last August, 175 films, including features, shorts and documentaries, were screened for 100,000 visitors. The SFF aims to encourage the region’s film industry, and between festivals runs a development programme for aspiring local auteurs.

Inevitably, the region’s wars and their aftermath provide them with subject-matter. The 2001 winner was Danis Tanovic’s anti-war ‘No Man’s Land’, the blackest of tragicomedies (it is set in a minefield) that went on to win an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. This year’s nine-day festival opens on August 15 with Aida Begic’s ‘Snow’.  Two businessmen try to bribe a group of women, whose men died in the war, to abandon their isolated village and its memories.  It came equal-first in the Critics’ Week parallel competition for new directors at Cannes in May.

This year, Tanovic returned to Bosnia, hoping to found a new political party with the aim of breaking the dysfunctional post-war mould of Bosnian politics.  ‘No Man’s Land’ has reportedly been shown in Serbia, but not in Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb homeland.  Yet Banja Luka started its own film festival this May, showing ‘The Band’s Visit’ by Eran Kolirin, which tells of an Egyptian policemen’s band who mistake their venue, arriving at a dead-end Israeli desert town.  If the Bosnian Serbs can award first prize to a gentle, humane film about the Middle Eastern divide, there may be hope for Bosnia yet.