Sarajevo Film Festival

Dave Calhoun spends a long weekend in the Bosnian capital, where its annual film festival is a testament to the city’s recovery after war – and its love of cinema

For a small city in the Balkans, Sarajevo attracts some high-profile names to its annual high-summer film shindig. Here, surrounded by the green hills and distant graveyards that remind you of the three-year siege suffered by the people of the Bosnian capital in the early 1990s, audiences and filmmakers mix in a low-key environment that’s free of queues or industry folk screaming blue murder into their mobiles.

On a flying visit during the festival’s first three days, I spy Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (‘Climates’, ‘Uzak’), who is serving as this year’s jury president; Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke (‘Still Life’, ‘Platform’), who is bunking off from Olympics duty to present his new film ‘24 City’; fashion designer Agnès B, who has lent a hand-scrawled ‘J’aime Sarajevo! J’aime le cinéma’ tagline to the festival’s poster; and James Marsh, the British documentary director who is here to present current hit ‘Man on Wire’. Mike Leigh is here, too, and is something of a local star: this is his sixth visit and for the past four years he has been involved with the Katrin Cartlidge award in honour of the late actress.

A crowd of young people are here to watch new films from eastern Europe, the Balkans and Turkey, as well as to catch a selection of new work from around the world, much of which, such as Charlie Kaufman’s ‘Synecdoche, New York’, is fresh from the world’s bigger, starrier festivals. It’s the only chance a local audience will have to access such a range of cinema, so it’s exciting to sit in a packed cinema on a Sunday afternoon surrounded by barely anyone over the age of 18 all watching ‘Ciao Bella’, a Swedish teen film: whenever the music kicks in, the row of girls in front of me all start waving their arms in unison.

Another highlight of this lively festival is its series of nighttime, open-air screenings: the one I attend is of ‘Gomorra’, the mafia drama which picked up the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes. I also pop my head round the door to see how Leigh’s ‘Happy-Go-Lucky’ is going down with a Bosnian audience: very well, it seems.

I catch a few films from the region. There’s ‘Autumn’, an introspective Turkish film about a young man who is released from jail to return to the home of his elderly mother in the hills above the Black Sea, and ‘The Fourth Man’, a Serbian thriller that deals with war crimes in the style of ‘The Bourne Identity’. There are many reminders of war: I watch a short film of interviews with soldiers from Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia and even the upbeat teen film is preceded by a half-hour film on the dangers of landmines.

One of the coups of this year’s festival is a retrospective of the films of Todd Haynes, from his first short, ‘Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud’, to last year’s Bob Dylan portrait, ‘I’m Not There’. I catch up with ‘Safe’, his 1995 Aids allegory about an upscale LA woman suffering from a mysterious illness. I’m sad to leave town before the ‘surprise film’ is revealed. I’m not supposed to tell you what it is, but all I’ll say is: don’t tell Richard Carpenter.

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