Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media

In late August, the Sarajevo Film Festival reconvened for its eleventh year amidst the city's bullet-ridden medieval Ottoman wooden houses, pale yellow nineteenth century Austrian municipal buildings, nineteen-sixties cement skyscrapers, scattered minarets, and steeples. The festival has an upbeat feel, no doubt an emotion rooted in its 1994 inception at the end of the terrible four-year siege, when they first screened films, against all odds, with the few daily hours of electricity allotted them. As the only festival dedicated to showcasing regional movies (Thessalonka specializes in something similar but its focus is national), including documentaries, features and specials, the festival has continually expanded and now includes competition entries beyond the Balkans, such as those from Hungary and the Czech Republic. This dimension is one that the organizers wish to develop on all fronts—both artistically and practically.

The festival's distribution forum, CineLink, (a version of Rotterdam's CineMart) takes up its last few days and gathers together producers from Europe—especially Germany and France—to meet with filmmakers from countries of former Yugoslavia, Greece, Macedonia, Bulgaria, and others. As important, Sarajevo still has no art cinemas and thus the festival fulfills the enormous role of bringing multi-faceted art films to the area. The Panorama Section, programmed by New Yorker Howard Feinstein for the last eight years, also provides this art selection and was consistently interesting. Notable among its offerings were Hany Abu-Assad's incisive Palestinian feature Paradise Now (2005), the fascinating Spanish documentary by young filmmaker Mercedes Alvarez, The Sky Turns (2004), and Minh Nguyen-Vo's lyrical Vietnamese Buffalo Boy (2004), all of which have shown in other festivals but make a particularly good international representation. Other sidebars included [End Page 132] an homage to Alexander Payne, who attended, and an exhibition called New Currents, which was programmed by Philippe Bober to include an array of experimental features and animations, such as Ilya Khrzhanovsky's Russian 4 (2004) and the Danish animation Terkel in Trouble (2005). The festival is also expanding a teenage and children's program that attracts enough kids to fill a 2,500-seat cinema, a place whose entrance was often crowded with fashionably dressed, excited adolescents.

Elma Tataragic, the competition and shorts programmer, felt that the festival was beginning to find its footing and that this year's regional selection was especially good. She saw something new emerging—these films were developing intimate stories (versus solely social or global themes), allowing greater international appeal. Certainly Lady Zee (2005), the Bulgarian film by director Georgi Djulgerov, and the festival's best feature prize winner (25,000 euros), was noteworthy and the best of the pick. Though it had a tired plot—girl forced into prostitution—Djulgerov's interesting take on how, as he put it, to "humanize" this storyline, placed his film in a category of its own. His characters, virtually all played by charismatic non-actors, speak straight to the camera, a device that was extremely effective, absolutely overcoming the burden of the cliché. The film and its faces lingered memorably. Other movies, such as Milos Radivojevic's Serbian Awakening from the Dead (2004) and Kornel Mundruczo's Hungarian Johanna (2005) were not as inventive and often relied on tried-and-true staples of Balkans' black humor: the corpse in a coffin, a figure who may rise from the dead, morbid hospitals, sex, and people in Kafka-esque bureaucracies, to name a few. The dominant theme was politics with special emphasis on current preoccupations—identity, transition, escape, return, and re-assimilation. A few that stood out were Ognjen Svilicic's Croatian Sorry for Kung Fu (2004), a simple black comedy focusing on racism and despair, and Milutin Petrovic's Serbian South by Southeast (2005), an over-the-top, cold war-like spoof on Hitchcock and watching films.

But some films, both regional and otherwise, relied on tropes that, in my opinion, are not available for metaphor...