The Need For Film - Sixth Sarajevo Film Festival

Afterimage, Jan, 2001 by Amra Baksic

Sixth Sarajevo Film Festival

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina

August 18-26, 2000

The story of the Sarajevo Film Festival (SFF) goes back to the year 1995, a time so different from ours. The festival started in unimaginable circumstances: in Bosnia and Herzegovina there was a war, Sarajevo was the besieged city. What could have been the possible reasons to start a film festival in a city where electricity and water are the biggest issues? Not being able to live a "normal life" does not imply that "normal needs" are forgotten. The need for film was the need felt by the people who started this festival. The need for the festival was a need shared by the whole city. The festival is living its own life in peace, dealing with ordinary problems--sponsors, audience, public opinion. The state of Bosnia is confronted with devastated economic and cultural infrastructure and corruption, so that the festival can hardly count on major financial help from the state. International organizations present in Bosnia are investing money mostly in democracy, organizing workshops and seminars and rebuilding inf rastructure. Culture and art are not on their agenda. Therefore, the festival has to prove that art--in this case film--is important and can do things nothing else is capable of. This year the SFF staff did a good job gaining support--the European Union was the exclusive sponsor of the Festival while other major sponsors were traditionally Agnes B, Paris, Swissair, Coca Cola.

However, the SFF is not seeking its place on the festival map by offering a specific type of movie (such as those based on regional orientation). Rather, it is showcasing several diverse programs highlighting some of the best films produced worldwide. The SFF is not tailored for the film fanatic only, nor is it a festival that builds its identity solely on ticket sales or glamour. The SFF is all these things while it also thrives, creating an atmosphere fit to reconcile the irreconcilable. Yet another SFF seems to have satisfied both the public at large and the somewhat less commercial and non-commercial producers, thus offering every individual the opportunity to choose from a variety of options.

Representing what's new in cinema there were 8 feature-length and 17 short films, curated by Phillipe Bober as part of the "New Currents Program." As part of the "Panorama Program," 17 features were screened, focusing on winners and blockbusters from other world festivals. The "Regional Program," shaped by Faruk Loncarevic, presented seven recent productions made in what were once socialist countries, now called "countries in transition." The last of them, the "Special Program," combined different elements containing all the various films from around the world that may not have a category, but nonetheless deserve to be seen.

And what about Bosnian films? From 1992, in Bosnia there has been only one feature-length film shot with 35 mm. Before the war the government was the major investor in the film industry, but this is no longer the case. Local film production has literally ceased to exist and young Bosnian filmmakers are looking for other ways to produce their films. Two short films seen in the Bosnia Program are the proof that the way does exist. Director Srdjan Vuletic did his Hop, Skip, Jump (2000) in co-production with Slovenian producers, and won the New York Film Academy Panorama Award at the Berlin Film Festival. This 16-minute film is a poignant story, made without too many words, about the times before the war, during the war and the time that has come just after the war, the time that might be difficult to define as the time of peace. The other film is Jasmila Zbanic's documentary Red Rubber Boots (2000). Her film is a story about Jasna R, who is searching for her two children--4-year-old Amar and 9-year-old Ajla, wh o were taken from her, killed by the Serbian Army and buried in a mass grave. Clear, hard and even subdued documentary language leaves a viewer speechless and numb after the film. Both films are shocking because of the layers not directly shown in the film but hidden deep within, not just because of the war past but rather because of the burden of our postwar present.

A lot has already been written about Lars Von Trier's Dancer in the Dark (2000), but the story of this festival, and the artistic visions represented cannot be told without this movie. Today Von Trier is one of the few European art film directors who can make people stand in long lines waiting for a ticket. Regardless of whether you have cried at the end or left before the end, there is one thing one has to admit: this is a successful essay on the genre films tradition. Dancer in the Dark is a new search for the musical and tragedy; naturally, it travels all the way to the boundaries of each of the genres while the aesthetics he opted for is the digital one. Both the success and the failure of this movie are to be found in the author's treatment of the narrative.

Many movies have sought their solution in the narrative structure and many directors have resorted to that narrative, particularly that of literary works. This is exactly what director Alison MacLean did in Jesus' Son (2000) in transposing Dennis Johnson's novel onto the screen. The novelty here is that the narrator is absolutely unreliable--a disinterested, indifferent junky nicknamed "Fuckhead," and it is upon this unreliable narrator that the whole structure of this movie lies. Like in the monologue of an old acquaintance who dispassionately describes the years that he left behind, the narration wanders around chaotically, creating the obscure world of the narrator--drug addiction and absurdity, without lecturing on morality.