Special Gala Premiere of “1395 DAYS WITHOUT RED”

This year’s Sarajevo Film Festival is enriched by another extraordinary event – a special gala premiere will offer Festival guests and numerous film lovers an opportunity to see ‘1395 Days without Red’, a film by Šejle Kamerić. This film premiered at the Whitworth gallery in Manchester, as part of the programme of the prestigious festival of art, theatre, music and special events (Manchester International Festival). Along with ‘The Life and Death of Marina Abramović’ by the famous theatre artist Bob Wilson and the spectacular music performance ‘Biophilia’ by Björk, also presented at MIF, the film by Kamerić is currently one of the most written about events in the British press. And it is being praised.

‘1395 Days without Red’ is a 60-minute film. No dialogue. The story is told through the architecture of an empty city - fragments of time and space merge into a beautiful cinematic situation. There is a woman pacing fast along the empty, or near-empty streets. ‘I watched the film with my eyes half averted. Though aware that it is a reconstruction I found it far more frightening than any Hollywood fiction,’ said in his review the critic Richard Dorment (The Telegraph, UK). ‘This is true terror, real fear. By the end I found I was sweating’, he said, adding that Tchaikovsky’s radiant music (Symphony No. 6, ‘Pathétique’) had become as urgent and insistent as Bernard Herrmann’s score for Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’.

In ‘1395 Days’ Mirabel Verdú walks down the Sniper Alley – we know her from Alfonso Cuarón’s legendary film ‘Y tu mamá también’. The Sarajevo Philharmonic is conducted by the well known New York composer and conductor Ari Benjamin Myers.

A special Sarajevo Film Festival screening is scheduled for Friday, 29 July, at the National Theatre at 22.30, with one additional screening on Saturday, 30 July, at 11.00, at the Cinema City.