The 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival has once again gathered films and film lovers from around the Balkans and further afield. The opening film of the festival was "Fatherland," which earned Pawel Pawlikowski the Best Director award at Cannes. Pawlikowski has a long history with Sarajevo, a history he touched upon in the later days of the festival during a master class. He directed the BBC documentary "Serbian Epics" (1992), about the "warrior poets" who were shelling Sarajevo during the war. It was a strange experience to see him introduce his latest film at an open-air screening, with the Sarajevo hills in the background, hills where he had been filming war criminals as they were committing their acts more than 30 years ago.
Stories from recent history and the present-day Balkans are naturally where the Sarajevo Film Festival excels. The morning press screenings all (except for a Georgian film) featured films from the region, and naturally, when you see them one after the other, as at all festivals, they start to rhyme. Visar Morina’s "Shame and Money" is the story of a Kosovar family who, betrayed by one of their own, lose their livelihood in the village and must go live in Prishtina at the mercy of relatives. In a crucial scene in which their landlord is cheating them, the grandmother of the house offers to pay the rest of the rent with her "lira" – at which the whole family is thrown into disbelief and grief. The gold lira, they do call it lira in Albanian, is the very last bastion of any Balkan (and, naturally, Turkish) family’s economy: once that is traded, destitution is not far ahead. The film visits several stations of the money-and-shame cycle, and at one point, when the father of the house approaches delirium due to despair, the camera moves to the (in) famous statue of Bill Clinton, under which a wedding party is dancing to furious Balkan drums.
Bill Clinton features in another film, "Dua," about an Albanian girl living in Prishtina as Serbian paramilitaries take over the town. It is a coming-of-age story in which Dua is trying to become a teenage girl while staving off Serbian street violence. The family gathers in front of the TV for dinner and talks about how Bill Clinton cannot remain indifferent to the images coming out of the villages where Albanians are forced to flee from Serbian violence. It is a film steeped in Balkan texture: dinners served with ladles, parents shouting "do not play with bread" and room doors with patterned glass.
The American presence in the Balkans is once again discussed in the documentary "To Hold a Mountain," which won the best documentary award this year. The film is about an aunt, Gara, and her niece living together in a mountain home in Montenegro. We are introduced to their daily routine of caring for the animals, keeping them clean and helping them take care of their young. In parallel, we learn the story of how the aunt assumed the role of mother for her niece in the aftermath of violence within the family. The film is meticulously put together: we are exposed to all kinds of motherhood, from cow to cat to human. A family of cats lives with the aunt and niece; they share a tiny bed but also make room for a few kittens for warmth. We see the aunt making cheese; hot milk is poured over and over from container to container. I could almost smell the scent of the milk.
On top of this simple life is the geopolitical aspect. NATO wants to establish a firing range where the mountain villagers graze their flocks, and so there are regular campouts to make the authorities understand that every bit of these mountains is inhabited by humans and animals. There is a funny moment when Gara, on her horse and addressing the crowd as to how the mountains belong to the people, asks the president of Montenegro to hear them. As it turned out, the president of Montenegro was in the audience, and I was one of the people who had to be moved to other seats so he could sit with his entourage. Now that the Balkan wars are over, the U.S. and NATO seem to be easy, neutral targets for venting local anger. But, as my Bosnian friends warn me, this anger is also often used as a front for revitalizing Serbian nationalism.
The uneasy past resurfaces in some more, some less explicit ways throughout the festival. One of these instances is the screening of a restored copy of "Death and the Dervish" (1974), adapted from a 1966 novel I taught for many years in my graduate classes. I also remember seeing a poster for a play version the first time I visited Sarajevo in 2006. It is a text that speaks to several periods, as it is a communist-era rendering of the Ottoman period in Bosnia. The author Mesa Selimovic uses the Ottoman hierarchies of the khadi, the mufti and the sheikh to stand in for the various levels of the Politburo, all the while processing the execution of his own brother by the Partisan forces some 20 years earlier. The novel is pages and pages of self-questioning, which is, of course, difficult to reflect on the screen.
The film opens with a dhikr, and we get the story of Sheikh Nureddin, who has flashbacks to his "alperen" days. In these flashbacks, we see a band of ghazis, with bloodied, curved swords, advancing on their enemies and praying to Allah. In that sense, the communist producers understood the concept of the alperen very well: warriors who are also deeply steeped in the Sufi tradition. Our hero is one of these warriors, having hung up his sword and donned his robe and turban to say graces at the tekke. But then, when his brother is arrested, he has to engage in some Machiavellian courtly fighting. Letters go back and forth from "Tsarigrad," appointing one official and dismissing another. Istanbul: Tsarigrad in the Balkan imagination, Constantinople in the English subtitles. I do not read it as an erasure of Kostantiniyye every time the actors say Tsarigrad, the city of the Tsar, the one capital the Balkans have known for a thousand and five hundred years, from the Byzantines to the Ottomans.
The film works as an ode to one dead empire (the communist) from another (the Ottoman). Where are they both now? My Bosnian friend has the answer: some of the cast of this 1970s film resurfaced in the 1990s as Chetniks, with the leading lady posing with the likes of Karadzic. This is a moment that reminds me how much the politics of a production team and cast, and their subsequent lives, can change the meaning of a film.
The program included many more Balkan films that I did not have time to see and that would no doubt have added further layers to this already complex picture. Of course, the festival also offers the opportunity to see films from around the world, including new works that have recently received acclaim elsewhere. Yet for anyone interested in the region, the Sarajevo Film Festival remains a must, especially for the way it brings together stories that revisit the Balkans’ near and distant past.
