17th Sarajevo Film Festival Programmes

Competition Feature Film ^{List of the Films!}
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 ^{List of the Films!}
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 ^{List of the Films!}
Focused on the regional cinematography, and on the movies from this part of the world, that were not shown at major festivals despite their extraordinary quality. This region was OFF five years ago and now it is completely In FOCUS.

Sarajevo Film Festival has over the last few years bravely and successfully promoted films from the region and discovered the now successful and respected auteurs, such as Pjer Žalica (GORI VATRA – FUSE), winner in 2003, Zornitza Sophia (MILA FROM MARS), SFF winner in 2004; Arsen Ostojić (TA DIVNA SPLITSKA NOĆ – THAT BEATIFUL SPLIT NIGHT) winner of the Special Jury Award in the same year, Andrea Štaka (DAS FRAULEIN), 2006 winner and Faruk Lončarević (MAMA I TATA – MOM AND DAD), 2006 winner of the Special Jury Award; and directed attention again at authors Georgi Djulgerov (LADY ZEE), and Isa Qosja (KUKUMI) SFF winners in 2005.

Competition Documentary Film ^{List of the Films!}
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 was a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam for eight years. Currently, she is teaching at the Dutch Institute for Film Education NIF, and is a guest lecturer 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.

Open Air ^{List of the Films!}
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.

Panorama ^{List of the Films!}
In 2010, for the first time, the strands at the Sarajevo Film Festival known as Panorama (fiction), which began in 1999, and Panorama Documentaries, started in 2001, have been combined into one umbrella Panorama. (I must thank Miro Purivatra for the suggestion, something Berlin’s Panorama has been doing for some time.) This makes perfect sense: The distinction between fiction and documentary is more and more blurred. But whether one pigeonholes a film as a work of fiction or as a documentary, each one tells a story.

The directors whose works are shown in Panorama usually have complete creative control over their films. They have stories to tell, and make most of the decisions on the appropriate way to convey them to the audience.

Tribute to… ^{List of the Films!}
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 - Tribute to Programme 2011!

Panorama feature and documentary selection, as well as the Tribute to.. are programmed by Howard Feinstein, a film critic and journalist living in New York. Before he committed primarily to writing, he was a researcher at the Museum of Modern Art’s department of film, and film editor at the Village Voice. He has written for many publications, including The New York Times, Vanity Fair and GQ. Currently he writes for the Guardian, Filmmaker magazine, The Advocate and indieWIRE.

New Currents ^{List of the Films!}
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 distribution and production company The Coproduction Office, Bober has been involved in the production of recent festival successes such as The Battle in Haven by Carlos Reygadas, Death of Mr. Lazarescu by Cristi Puiu, 12:08 East of Bucharest by Corneliu Poromboiu, Import/Export by Urlich Seidl and You, The Living by Roy Anderson.

New Currents Shorts ^{List of the Films!}
New Currents Shorts is a panorama of recent international creations, a subjective selection of film from all over Europe, different in their aesthetic and narrative biases. There is no specific tendency, but rather expressive particularities. For, the wager of this choice is to discover the authors of tomorrow while showing the possibilities short film can offer.

Together with the Competition Shorts, New Currents Shorts films are competing for PRIX UIP and nomination for the Best Short Film at the European Film Academy.

Programmer for this selection is Vanja Kaluđerčić. She  is a regular co-worker of Motovun Film Festival. She worked on different projects at Slovenian Cinematheque and arthouse cinema Kinodvor, Ljubljana. She is one of the cofounders of Isola Cinema - a film festival dedicated to African, Asian, Latin American and Eastern European cinema. She writes for Slovenian magazine for cinema, Ekran. From 2004 till 2007 she programs Human Rights Film Festival in Zagreb. From 2006 till 2008 she works at International Documentary Festival of Zagreb where she manages ZagrebDox Pro. Since 2006 she is regularly running film evenings in Zagreb's  popular cultural club Mochvara. From 2006 to 2008 she worked at Hulahop Film and Art production company, and is in charge of production management of World Festival of Animated Films – Animafest. Currently she works in Paris at Coproduction Office where she is in charge of acquisitions and short film catalogue.

Children's Programme ^{List of the Films!}
The Sarajevo Film festival's Children's Programme is a unique selection of films which attracts over 30 000 young viewers from all over Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was founded in the early years of the Festival. Its primary goal was to captivate and entertain the children of post-war Bosnia, many of whom had never been to the cinema before. This programme was well known for its screenings at the KSC Skenderija venue, which for years was specially converted into the largest movie theatre in South-eastern Europe. During the last three years we have carefully balanced big-budget animated films with a selection of independent children’s films to make a satisfying programme for this numerous audience. For the duration of the programme, prior to each screening, the children from all over Bosnia and Herzegovina participate in numerous additional educational and entertaining activities. In addition to the main screenings, that will from this year take place in Cinema City additional re-runs of all the films within the Children's Programme are shown in the Novi Grad Municipality movie theatre.

TeenArena ^{List of the Films!}
TeenArena programme is dedicated to young viewers ranging from the age of 13 to 19. This program gave a generation of teenagers access to the largest film festival in the region, and provided them with films suited to their taste and age. 

The focus is mostly on independent European feature fiction films, which compete for the Best Teen Film award, which is nominated by the joint votes of a jury and the audience. 

TeenArena tries to attract young filmmakers and actors, who will interact with the domestic audiences through carefully organized discussions and events.

Sarajevo City of Film ^{List of the Films!}
Sarajevo City of Film is the fund supporting the realisation of short micro-budget films, created through artistic and technical cooperation between the young film authors from the South-Eastern Europe.

Katrin Cartlidge Foundation
Shortly after the 8th Sarajevo Film Festival, the sudden death of British actress Katrin Cartlidge stunned the world. A favourite in both film and theatre, Katrin Cartlidge left behind an indelible trace in the world of film, as well as in the hearts of all those who admired her achievements.

The Katrin Cartlidge Foundation was created in memory of the life and work of this brilliant actress. It exists to encourage, in the form of an annual bursary awarded to a new creative voice in cinema, the independence, singularity and integrity of spirit that Katrin Cartlidge powerfully embraced and exemplified in her own lifetime. 

Each year, the Foundation’s Trustees select a curator (or curators) who search for a recipient for the Foundation's annual bursary. The grant constitutes only a small part of the support that the Foundation offers these young artists; perhaps the most valuable part of the award is the mentoring that they receive from the Foundation's Trustees and Patrons who include some of the world's finest filmmakers, producers and actors.

BH Film ^{List of the Films!}

BH Film programme presents short, documentary and fiction films from Bosnia and Herzergovina, produced during the past year. The programme is organized jointly with Association of Filmmakers of Bosnia and Herzegovina and its aim is promotion of B&H cinema.


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