The 31st Edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival wrapped up in the last week of a very hot August, having treated audiences to a wide variety of films from the region and beyond. The awards recognized the talent that is emerging from Southeast Europe with the much anticipated "Wind, Talk to Me," a Serbian, Slovenian and Croatian coproduction, winning the Heart of Sarajevo for best feature film. The film is about a Serbian filmmaker trying to make a film about his mother, which then turns into a video-memoir of his family in general.
This thin line between documentary and feature is a thread that runs through many of the films in the festival, including my personal favorite, the North Macedonian full feature, "DJ Ahmet," documenting the bitter-sweet life of a young Turkish shepherd in the mountains. The film has proven its public popularity by receiving the UniCredit Audience award. The film's credits curiously include Serbia but not Türkiye, and a member of the audience felt compelled to ask how it was that Türkiye was not one of the producers in a film that recounts the poetry of Turkish village life.
Serbia is indeed the name that repeats most often in the films that have won awards. For the discerning audience, there are also films from Bosnia – the very popular "Bosnian Knight," whose protagonist is described in the programme as having escaped to Srebrenica during the war and survived the genocide. The film itself can be said to offer a kind of escapism from dealing with the genocide, trying to find inspiration in the medieval history of the country. A documentary that comes closer to dealing with what happened in Srebrenica and its aftermath is "Family" by Davorin Sekulic, telling the story of how his Bosnian-Serbian family fled to Macedonia when the war started, and how, when they returned, Srebrenica was a dead city. Still delving deeper is "None Will Speak the Truth," following the story of camp survivor Esef Dzenanovic, reminiscing about his lost ones. Both these films can be filed under "memory studies" – which leave me wanting something more investigative, like Aida Hadzimusic’s 2024 documentary "Uncle’s Ring" in which the relative of someone who was executed in Srebrenica walks up to the perpetrators who still live there and asks them why they did it. In the same way, Gaza’s children, in the near future, will point the camera to the perpetrators and supporters of genocide and silent onlookers like ourselves.
When it comes to programming from the region, an interesting find for me were the films from Montenegro, an impressive output from a small nation. "Otter," a film about a young girl navigating her family’s traditions and desire, was the press screening that opened the competition. A real Montenegrin gem that was screened as part of the "In Focus" program was Ivan Salatic’s "Wondrous is the Silence of My Master," a mood piece about the life of a Montenegrin poet and leader, inspired by the life of the historical figure Petar II Petrovic Njegos. In the Q and A, Salatic warned against a reading of the film for historical accuracy and said he had conceived it more like a nightmare, with an unexplained plot and characters. This nightmare analogy becomes spot on when Marlok, the leader poet in the film, flees the Turks and finds refuge in a Neapolitan villa, which, for his sins, seems to be decorated in the Turkish fashion and he has to live out the rest of his days in a room with Iznik tiles.
This year the festival launched a section run by one of their partners, the Doha Film Institute, which allowed the festival goers to watch films from the Arab world, including from Gaza. The two standouts for me were "Once Upon a Time in Gaza" and "Dead Dog." "Once Upon a Time in Gaza" is a slick detective noir that ends in a pastiche, and the Lebanese director Sarah Francis’s "Dead Dog" is a beautifully shot feature film that works at times like a video essay about a couple’s relationship.
From its beginnings, Sarajevo Film Festival has attracted big names from both Europe and Hollywood, in a kind of atonement, it seems to me, for having allowed a genocide to happen "in the middle of Europe" (why genocide in Europe should be less allowed than other genocides is a perennial question). This year’s masterclasses kicked off with Paolo Sorrentino, who had the spacious Bosnian Cultural Center hall filled to the gills. Sorrentino was in a very playful mood, saying that when a young man, he wanted to do a job that required no special skills, and from what he read, he thought the profession of directing was one such job.
As the conversation went on this light vein, about his favourite football team and the like, one member of the audience asked what he thought the role of the film director is during the time of genocide, given that we were living through one and that he was a guest of a people who survived one. It was surprising to me that Sorrentino looked surprised at the question – which is an indicator that genocide is not mentioned in these cultural events half as much as it should. He said that films could not stop genocide and that as a film director whatever he would say would be banal and that he agreed with those who said that what was going on was a genocide. A pretty weak answer from someone who likes to philosophize on the meaning of art, life and politics in his films. One can only hope he will now give it some more thought and be more prepared in his next interview.
Although the programming and the invited guests may not have had too much time for Gaza, marches against genocide that passed by the red carpet, audience members wearing the keffiyeh and watermelon emblems – and the more courageous intervening – served to remind us that we are trying to "do culture" during a time of genocide, and there is more than one way to bear witness.
