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SARAJEVO, August 10 (FENA) - The Sarajevo Film Festival (SFF), which will be held from August 12 to 19, this year brings a large number of films, as many as 232 productions in 19 program sections from 63 countries, as well as other new content that enriches the offer for all fans of the seventh art.
One of the novelties of this year is that the day before the official opening of the Festival, on Thursday, August 11, a special pre-festival screening of the working version of the film about Emerik Blum directed by Jasmila Žbanić will be held at the Coca-Cola Open Air Cinema.
Director of the Sarajevo Film Festival, Jovan Marjanović, in an interview for FENA, said that it is interesting to have a working version of the documentary about Emerik Blum and the development of Sarajevo and Energoinvest's part in the whole story.
“It is even more interesting that this screening includes an invitation to audience to participate in the completion of the production of that film in order to bring this topic closer to a larger number of people. It is, however, important to note that 60,000 people worked at Energoinvest, at its peak,” Marjanović pointed out.
He stated that these people, at least some of them, are still there in Sarajevo, as well as their families, friends, and that they may have information that the co-production could not obtain.
One of the programs of the Sarajevo Film Festival is the Avant Premiere Program, which presents sneak previews of European films and regional drama series for Sarajevo Film Festival audience.
The premieres of recently produced regional drama series will be shown within this program. The audience of the Festival will be able to watch previews of the first two episodes of six regional drama series.
One of them is the BiH series "Kotlina" by Danis Tanović and Amra Bakšić Čamo, produced by BH Telecom and SCCA/pro.ba.
In addition to Bosnia and Herzegovina, series from Slovenia, Serbia and Croatia will also be shown, which will also have their world premieres at SFF.
Marjanović believes that the entire region produces more and more series, and thus the countries of the former Yugoslavia realize 40 feature series per year.
“That is already one quantity that is followed by quality. The series are made by our highest quality film workers. The audience is more and more interested in this, as well as broadcasters, BH Telecom or traditional public services, televisions are investing more and more in this format. The Sarajevo Film Festival has its place in this whole story as the place of the premiere and impetus for those programs in front of the audience,” he assessed.
This year, the Competition Program – Documentary Film is richer by one award, the Heart of Sarajevo award, for best short documentary film.
The Director of SFF explains that there was a need to separate feature-length and short-length films within the documentary program.
Speaking about the documentary film, Jovanović is of the opinion that it is a genre that is at the heart of everything that is done within the framework of SFF. Thus, in addition to the documentary film, competition programs related exclusively to documentary films, as well as Cinelink programs and the Human Rights Award and other festival segments are linked.
“The presence of documentary films at the Sarajevo Film Festival has never been stronger than in the last few years,” underlined Marjanović.
The director of the Sarajevo Film Festival reflected on the impact of this film festival, stressing that it is an event that affects different spheres - economy, culture, society.
“I think that this is already a recognized fact. The annual budget of the Sarajevo Film Festival is changing. It varies between three and a half to four and a half million KM. These funds come from different sources - from commercial sponsors, public sources at all levels of government in BiH, foreign foundations, the European Union,” stated Marjanović.
He also reminded that on the cultural level, the audience has the opportunity to see films that they otherwise would not have the opportunity to see if it were not for the Sarajevo Film Festival, while when it comes to the social effects of SFF, the fact that vacations are planned according to the date of the Festival speaks for itself, and that in general Sarajevo is very much alive during SFF.
This year, after two years of the coronavirus pandemic, measures and restrictions, SFF returns to full capacity, concluded SFF director Jovanović.
(FENA) A. B.
