The 14th Sarajevo Film Festival

This article first appeared in Bosnian in GE Vibes 006 – September 2008.

By Tatjana Slijepcevic

14th Sarajevo Film Festival
15 – 23 August 2008

Sarajevo Film Festival is one of the most important and most visited cultural manifestations in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is the time when the best parties and concerts are taking place in Sarajevo at the end of the summer, when the streets are full of people who laugh and enjoy great mood, when you fell that special, festival atmosphere wherever you go. Many  people will tell you that this is the time when Sarajevo really lives. However, the value of this event does not lie in the fact that it gathers more  and more people, celebrities, film directors, producers and actors each year and that it is a place for exchange of information and ideas about different possibilities for the development of the film art in this region. 

We find the true value of the festival in the fact that it was started in 1995, when Bosnia and Herzegovina was still going through the war. To organize a festival at that time was a mission impossible, as we would call it today.  But strong will and enthusiasm of the people who started this undertaking resulted not just in making this project  possible, but they made it a central event in Sarajevo every summer and one of the most important events in the whole region.

Today, Sarajevo is proud that it hosts world-wide famous actors like Anthony Minghella, Mike Leigh, Bono Vox, Carol Bouquet, Enki Bilal, Gerard Depardieu, Jafari Panahi, John Malkovich, Peter Mullan, Jeremy Irons, Kevin Spacey, Vanessa Redgrave, Willem Dafoe and others.

Each year the interest for the festival grows which is most clearly reflected by numbers. At the beginning there were 15.000 visitors and later the number increased over 100.000, while the number of the movies screened increased from 37 to even 180.

I believe that the words of the festival organizers will explain its multiple significance much better: “Sarajevo Film Festival, with its focus on the latest film production in the region, with long and short movies, documentaries, recognition of the great regional film producers and co- production market CineLink –is the most important meeting point of all the film workers from the region and a key place of networking and exploring the possibilities that this region offers.”