Sarajevo Film Festival Opens with a Bang

Sarajevo Film Festival Opens with a Bang

Sarajevo, Saturday August 18 2007


Flying into Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina last night from Moscow via Vienna I expected to experience a little déjà vu. I was last here two years ago, for the 11th Sarajevo Film Festival and arrived on another inky dark Balkans summer night on a turboprop from Belgrade.

My overriding impressions then, in 2005, as we drove into the city was of the war-torn buildings still in evidence everywhere. During the festival I stayed at the Holiday Inn – the hotel where the international press had lived during the siege of Sarajevo in the first half of the 1990s. Ten years after the Daytona Peace Accords brought Sarajevo piece, the area around the Holiday Inn was still dominated by shrapnel and shell scarred homes and offices. A nearby ten or fifteen story office block was a window-less concrete shell peppered on the side that faced towards the old Serb positions across the river with massive star-shaped shell holes.

Last night as the taxi drove me down along the same street – the old suicide alley where during the siege drivers raced at high speed aware that they were within sight and ranger of the besieging Serb gunners – I searched for the scarred tower block in vain: it is now a sleek tinted-glass covered corporate building of the sort one can find in any European capital.

Sarajevo has become a building site. In the old town of area of Bascarsilja – which last night was buzzing with masses of young and fashionable Sarajevans enjoying the special late opening of cafes and restaurants put on to celebrate the opening of this year’s 13th film festival – shops and bars have appeared where two years ago there were only dusty and damaged pock-marked facades.

The crumbling concrete and dirt alleys of the crowded and narrow streets of this charming part of the city are being replaced with gleaming slabs of limestone paving and scaffolding is everywhere.

It’s a clear sign that the city is moving beyond its post-war hiatus.

Even last night’s opening party – held inside the impressive ruins of the old Sarajevo town hall, which was left an empty shell after being targeted by Serb forces in 1992 – an act decried at the time as a war crime against a building that also housed the literary treasures of the Bosnian national library – was a surreal experience.

The building is under reconstruction and its interior is only partially restored – guests entered from the riverside street through an opening in the steel construction site barrier before ascending stone stairs to the airy hexagonal interior. Inside lights lit up the first floor balcony that skirts the six-sided interior, crowded temporary bars dispensed beer, wine and spirits and a Bosnian folk singer performed on a small carpeted stage set up in the centre of the ground floor.

The place was packed. To go to the upper floor one had to struggle up a temporary wooden plank staircase past grubby bare brick walls still peppered with graffiti and stained black and green from the conflagration of 15 years ago.

Some of the old Islamic-style stone arches had been restored and the balustrades on the balcony were mostly now gleaming white limestone. Looking up to the rooftop atrium a maze of decorative iron girders are already in place. Two years ago when I walked past the building I could only imagination how it looked inside; there were no signs then of imminent reconstruction.

On the open first floor terrace overlooking the river guests crowded to look out over the nighttime city as uniformed guards warned them not to go too close to the stone parapet, taped off with red and white security tape indicating it was not considered safe.

At midnight a firework display to mark the opening of the film festival sent blasts and echoed resounding from across the other side of the river.

It was all rather surreal: 15 years ago other kinds of explosives were raining down upon the city from positions across the same river. The crowds watched and the camera crews filmed as music from another, much deeper in the past time, started up: a Viennese waltz of the sort that the old Austro-Hungarian functionaries of the pre-First World War era might have listened to in this very same building back when Sarajevo was a far flung provincial capital of that now long dead empire. German “oompah” music was next prompting different associations from another time and another war when Sarajevo was occupied by Hitler’s hordes.

If the idea was to prompt thoughts of war and peace it seemed to work, at least for this guest.

The city seems to be reclaiming its identity and re-staking its claim as a tourist destination: my father-in-law Vyacheslav still proudly recalls his visit when Sarajevo hosted the winter Olympics back in 1984. Roadside placards reminding guests and visitors that Sarajevo is an ‘Olympic’ city has sprouted anew.

And Sarajevo long had a claim to fame as the city where ‘the first shot of the First World War was fired’ when on June 28 1914 Serb nationalist Gavril Princip assassinated Austro-Hungarian crown prince Franz Ferdinand sparking the rapid succession of events that lead up to the outbreak of world war by early August. (Ironically Princip – chosen for the mission because he had tuberculosis and was not expected to live long – actually outlived many of the poor souls the Great War eventually consumed. Sentenced to 20 years imprisonment, he died from tuberculosis in April 1918.)

Two years ago I was disappointed to find that the museum commemorating this event was closed. Last night as I walked back from the opening party I was delighted to find it now open and functioning: there on the very corner where Princip squeezed his trigger the museum of Sarajevo 1878-1918 is lit up with street side photographic and video displays. It’s on the top of my list of ‘must do’ visits this weekend.

Sarajevo is truly moving forward, but not so fast that is forgets its past. As film festival head Mirsad Purivatra reminded guests last night, the closing of the 13th Sarajevo Film Festival takes place on Saturday August 25 – exactly 15 years to the day since the building’s historic library was blitzed by the Serb gunners from their positions high up in the hills across the river.

In my next posting I shall attempt to draw together some reflections from films playing at the festival that further help elucidate the spirit and character of today’s Sarajevo and the Balkans.


NOTE: All material copyright 2007 Nick Holdsworth.

If any readers out there want to license this material (or offer me writing or journalistic commissions) please email me at: holdsworth.nick@gmail.com)