The Circuit

by Nick Holdsworth
Thirteen years after it first launched when mortars and sniping firing were still raining down on the besieged city, the Sarajevo Film Festival is reaching a synergy as both showcase and motor for regional film production.

Flying in from Moscow late Wednesday (Aug 20) – where the recent short but vicious war between Russia and Georgia still permeates every day life – Sarajevo, which suffered so much during the Balkans civil war in the 1990s, is an oasis of peace, its summer cafes throbbing with life and vitality.

Festival director Mirsad Purivatra does not like to dwell on the past.

Relieved that Sarajevo is again fulfilling its old role as a regional centre of creativity and art, Purivatra is thrilled at how the festival is maturing.

“My vision of the festival is that it fulfil three key, inter-related roles,” he says over a coffee in the tented ‘festival square’ that spreads out in front of the city’s National Theater where evening red carpet events are hosted.

The festival should continue to meet its role as an international event focusing on programming competition features, shorts and documentaries from the Balkans region and a rich program of 11 other sections of regional, European and world film.

As a crossroads for regional and European industry contacts its highly successful CineLink co-production market should carry on providing serving as a meeting point for producers, investment funds, TV companies and other professionals.

And its growing educational role – typified by last year’s addition in cooperation with the Berlinale of a talent campus – will help channel and guide emerging new directors, actors and producers in the right direction.

“I see Sarajevo as a platform for the development of the whole industry; focusing on regional film and improving standards to enable regional filmmakers to link into and integrate with Europe,” Purivatra says.

It’s clear that Sarajevo is already functioning in that way.

 As recently as my first visit here in 2005, when the city remained heavily scarred by the war with pockmarked buildings, bad roads and a sluggish economy, the festival had not quite got there.

Those European industrial professionals who had made it to the festival were enthusiastic – an Irish producer I met at CineLink in 2005 enthused about the raw power of stories coming out of the region and incredible wealth of locations.

Today Sarajevo has clearly moved beyond a tipping point and is fast growing in stature and value with projects it has nurtured not only turning up on its competition screens but making it to the big time too.

Take debut director Aida Begic’s “Snow” which opened this 14th edition of the festival in its Bosnian premiere last week.

Although it did not formally come through Sarajevo’s project incubator – with a producer, Elma Tataragic who doubles as the festival’s program director and a consultant, Amra Baksic, who runs CineLink, Begic felt there was a conflict of interest in applying for festival support – the film benefited tangentially.

“Our Iranian co-producers came to Sarajevo in search of a project and heard about my film here,” says Begic, still coming to terms with her success in Cannes where “Snow” won the top prize in the Critics’ Week section.

The film’s subject – which is about a village where most of the men have died in war and the surviving women are faced with selling their land to survive but losing their identities, bound up in the land and tradition, in the process – appealed to the Iranians, a country with its own experiences of war and tragedy.

The access that the festival has given film professionals in Sarajevo and the wider region to the European network of film funds, festivals and training events, was critical to32 year old Begic’s development: She attended the Cannes co-production Atelier in 2005 where French and German coproducers came on board.

Amra Baksic, who runs CineLink – now in its seventh year – notes a coincidental emergence of a strong regional cinema with CineLink’s own growth.

Last year Sarajevo had one film in the main competition that had found its coproduction partners through CineLink – “It’s Hard to be Nice”, a Bosnian/Slovenian/Germany coprod, which picked up a best actor gong. This year it has two competition films, both of which came through CineLink in 2006: Croatia’s “Kino Lika” and Bosnian/Croatian “Buick Riviera” which also has a British coproducer, Mike Downey.

“It is hard to say if there is any direction correlation, but I have been doing an analysis to see what has influenced what and can see that regional cinema has moved from virtually nothing seven years ago to a force today that is frequently cropping up at major European festivals,” says Baksic.

“Romanian, Bosnian, Slovenian and Hungarian films are all firmly on the European map in a way they were not just a few years ago. It is very hard to say how much of that is due to us, but probably we are some kind of catalyst; that we offer some kind of a platform for people from these countries.”

It’s a point that Dagmar Forelle, head of sponsorship for the Berlin Film Festival, agrees with.

“The kind of network that we see emerging between festivals is very noticeable; everybody is sharing resources, competence and know-how to help emerging filmmakers find their way through the jungle of financing. Sarajevo is playing its part in that network and synergy.”

Ivana Ivisic, Sarajevo’s Talent Campus manager, can vouch for how swiftly and effectively initiatives can help.

Now in its second year, the campus – organised in association with Berlin’s talent campus – enables some 80 young directors, producers or actors from across the Balkans region to benefit from an intensive program of workshops and training sessions.

In an allied initiative five projects from last year’s participants shared in a 100,000 Euro Sarajevo City of Film scheme that allowed small teams comprised of people from at least three different countries to shoot short films in the city, the results of which are being presented at this year’s festival.

“Those young filmmaking teams are mixing with this year’s young talents and sharing their experience; I am very confident that we shall soon see some of these people at CineLink with their projects and some of their films in competition here and elsewhere within the next few years,” said Ivisic.

Photos by Nick Holdsworth.