18th Sarajevo Film Festival Programmes

Competition Feature Film
The Competition Programme in this category gives priority to the films which will have either world or international premiere at the Sarajevo Film Festival. All the films will be shown in primetime, at the Sarajevo National Theatre, preceded by screenings for journalists, photo sessions for photographers, interviews and press conferences, which are to take place prior to the official screening. The Competition Programme is also a Red Carpet event. As the main programme of the Sarajevo Film Festival, the Competition Programme attracts over 150 guest directors, screen-writers, producers, actors, actresses and other people from film industry. Over the past four years, this Programme has become the most important meeting point of the East European film and all of those interested in cinematography of the countries represented.

Programmer for Competition Feature and Short selection and In Focus is Elma Tataragić. She was born in Sarajevo in 1976. She has graduated Dramaturgy at Sarajevo Academy of Performing Arts. She is one of the founders of Sarajevo Film Festival where she now works as selector for Competition Program (feature and shorts),IN FOCUS and BH FILM programs. She collaborated on the script for short film FIRST DEATH EXPERIENCE and wrote and produced short NORTH WENT MAD. She has produced and co-wrote the feature film SNOW shown at Cannes 2008 – Semaine de la critique where the film won the Grand Prix. The film has been shown at over 60 festivals and won over 20 international awards. She is also general secretary and a member of BH Filmmakers Association. She has been teaching screenwriting at Sarajevo Academy of Performing Arts since 2002. She has completed postgraduate studies and is currently working on her thesis on screenwriting. She is also attending London-based Script Factory scriptwriting courses.

Competition Short Film
The goal of this Programme is to discover and promote the young and talented authors who, with their films, change the world or express their attitudes about the way in which the world changes.

 Selection of this Programme has always been very diverse in terms of approach and film expression. The short films were always a special category in the cinematographies of the region, and often the form by which these films were known and recognized in the world of film. Short film is not only the author’s step towards the feature film but also a specific way of the film expression. Short films were always about testing the boundaries of the film language, breaking conventions and challenging “rules”, and establishing new forms.

 Films in this selection are competing for the Best Short Film Award and two special mentions of the Jury. The winners of this Programme, together with short films from the New Currents Programme, are directly in the competition for the nomination of the European Film Academy in the category of short film.

In Focus

 

In Focus programme brings the best from regional cinema from the past year. It is a showcase of exceptional films which already made considerable success at the prestigious film festivals worldwide or at their local markets.

 

In Focus is a selection of powerful films from established filmmakers to debutants. Films in this selection are not competing for Sarajevo Film Festival’s awards. 

Competition Documentary Film
A decade of transition in which many countries faced with several difficulties has passed. After the new political systems, and somewhere even completely new states in the region were established, the film has become more than a mere cultural matter. It has become a sophisticated way of expressing identity of a nation and creating a recognizable voice that echoes as far as abroad. On film one often reflects and examines political reality and attempts of establishing dialogue and solving mutual conflicts. In that, documentaries are particularly important.

According to world trends over the past years, there are more and more creative auteur documentaries in the region, while in the production of TV documentaries and reportage an attempt was made towards a more serious works, based on in-depth investigations and expressed in an inherent film language.

Since Sarajevo Film Festival very much insists on supporting creative documentaries in the region, in 2006. The Award for the Best Documentary was established. In addition to that, films from this selection are competing for the Human Rights Award, which is awarded to the best film dealing with the issue of human rights.

Programer for this selection is Rada Šešić. She is a film author living in the Netherlands where she directed four films: “Room without a view” 1997, “Soske” 2001, “In whitest solitude” 2002 and “On the way to school” 2007. Her films were screened and bought off by MoMa, New York. Šešić is a selector of the documentary films at the “IDFA” in Amsterdam, as well as programme adviser of the International Film Festival in Rotterdam. Šešić has also been a member of the selection committee of the Hubert Bals Fund and the Jan Vrijman Fund. She is employed at the Dutch Film Academy in Amsterdam, under the "Master of Film Studies" as a senior professor. She was also a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam for eight years, at the Dutch Institute for Film Education NIF, and at the Faculty of Film in Bangalore, India. Šešić has also been an adviser for South-Eastern films at the DOK Leipzig Festival, and a programmer at the IFFK – Festival in Kerala, India. As a film critic she has been writing for the Skrien, Dox, FimGuide, Film Annals, and the Sineast.

Kinoscope
The programme comprise films from around the world, both narrative and documentary, choosing 18 films from around the globe excluding the southeastern European territories which compose the festival’s competition strand. The focus is on distinctive titles marked out for their mise-en-scene and will take in great auteurs as well as first and second film-makers.

Programers for this selection are Mike Goodridge from the UK, Alessandro Raja from Italy and Mathilde Henrot from France.

Mike Goodridge is editor of Screen International. Based in London, he oversees all the brand’s output including Screendaily.com, the Screen International print products every month and daily at festivals and markets and the production database Screenbase. He has been at Screen since 1995 both in London and, for 12 years, in Los Angeles and is also a prolific critic for the brand. He is a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the London Film Critics Circle and FIPRESCI as well as BAFTA and the European Film Academy.

Alessandro Raja and Mathilde Henrot, founded and run Festival Scope the industry website showing online films from its selected & prestigious network of 70+ partner festivals including the festivals of Sundance, Rotterdam, Berlinale, Hong Kong, Directors' Fortnight and Critics' Week in Cannes, Locarno, Sarajevo, Venice, Toronto, San Sebastian and Busan. Both were previously in sales & acquisitions respectively at Celluloid Dreams and MK2 up until the development of Festival Scope.

Open Air
Open Air Programme offers the first-class film achievements to the satisfaction of the most demanding film fans. Every night, this attractive programme offers an unforgettable experience of watching films in !hej Open Air Cinema, under the stars on the biggest screen in the region and at top projection quality.

Apart from premieres of the new Bosnian films, the Open Air programme offers top quality European film, independent American production and films from the recent documentary feature production. Another very important thing for the future development of the !hej Open Air Cinema concept is the fact that nearly all of the films shown will be attended by several guests, producers, actors or directors, who will personally present their films to our numerous and diverse audience.

Tribute to…
In previous years, the Sarajevo Film Festival has hosted and presented retrospectives of authors whose uncompromising creative outlooks brought down many taboos in film and society alike, and attracted great attention of both the audiences and the media.

Guests of the Sarajevo Film Festival Tribute to Programme in previous years were:

• Steve Buscemi 2000
• Mike Leigh 2001
• Stephen Frears 2002
• Peter Mullan 2003
• Dušan Makavejev and Gaspar Noe 2004
• Alexander Payne 2005
• Abel Ferrara and Béla Tarr 2006
• Ulrich Seidl 2007

• Todd Haynes 2008

• Jia Zhang-ke 2009
• Bruno Dumont 2010

• Lucrecia Martel 2011

• Todd Solondz 2012

New Currents
The programme includes, above all, works by authors who break the rules of film as a medium and who test the limits of viewing.

 News Currents section clarifies its programming policy by proposing essentially first and second feature films from all corners of the world, and also by positioning itself with clear intention to look for and discover the great filmmakers of tomorrow – the director with a will to break norms, to do away with the chains of narration, to move beyond the borders of what has been shown before.

New Currents has been able to explore the development of digital filmmaking from its form-breaking infancy until now, to a level of maturity where its borders with celluloid have become blurred. The New Currents Programme is a strong reflection of the different directions in which independent film is moving today.

From its beginning New Currents feature film selection is programmed by Philippe Bober, an accomplished film producer. With his film distri