De Niro opens Sarajevo fest with strong regional lineup

This news has been read 5283 times!

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Aug 13, (Agencies): Robert De Niro opened the 22nd Sarajevo Film Festival on Friday, presented Martin Scorsese’s restored “Taxi Driver” and received the festival’s first lifetime achievement award — The Heart of Sarajevo. Over nine days, some 100,000 expected guests will watch 223 movies from 61 countries in nearly a dozen locations in the city. At the end, winners will be announced in seven categories. “I will treasure this award — my Heart of Sarajevo — because I don’t think there is another city in the world that has shown such heart in the face of so much tragedy,” De Niro said at the ceremony. The festival was born in a sandbag- protected basement during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war when a few enthusiasts organized screenings of whatever movie they could get in order to offer some sense of normalcy to the besieged city. Sarajevans braved snipers and mortars to come watch, often paying for tickets with cigarettes. People would enter the basement of the Academy of Performing Arts through a hole organizers knocked in the wall on the side of the building less exposed to bullets and shrapnel. Watching movies to the sound of the running generator and bombs outside felt like upgrading from pure survival to living.

Parallel
De Niro drew a parallel to the Tribeca Film festival he co-founded. The Sarajevo Film Festival “was born during a dark and dangerous time to counter the butchering of war with a celebration of art and humanity,” De Niro said. “Six years later, on Sept 11 in 2001 my own New York neighborhood was attacked and we started the Tribeca Film Festival as a gesture of hope, resilience and defiance,” he said.

After the Bosnian war, the Sarajevo festival grew from annual basement screenings into the largest film festival in Southeast Europe and an opportunity for regional film makers who rarely had the chance to mingle among colleagues in Cannes, Hollywood or Venice to meet, discuss projects and walk their own Red Carpet. By now it no longer is their own. Stars like Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Steve Buscemi, Kevin Spacey, Benicio del Toro and many others have in the past few years been presenting their movies here and have walked down the Red Carpet in front of the National Theater.

Festival, has become the top creative and industry catalyst for filmmakers and producers in the Balkans, Southeast Europe, and beyond, 22 years after its launch during the Bosnian civil war, as the city was under under siege. The winner of this year’s foreign-language Oscar, Hungarian Holocaust drama “Son of Saul”, was spawned by Sarajevo’s CineLink co-production market. During its upcoming edition, HBO will launch a call for projects to commission the first international TV series to come out of the Balkans.

As a regional platform, it’s come a long way. Documentaries are a key component of the selection since “the region has so many untold stories, so many secrets,” says fest founder and director Mirsad Purivatra. “Scream for Me Sarajevo”, a doc by Tarik Hodzic about a concert held by Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson and his solo band in 1994, with the city still under siege, will open the documentary competition. The eight-title feature film competition is dedicated to the cream of the cinematic crop from the region’s roughly 20 countries. The selection includes world premieres such as Montenegrin first-timer Ivan Marinovic’s “The Black Pin”, about a small seaside parish priest who clashes with his fl ock when he opposes a big property sale, and such regional bows as “Album”, the debut of Turkey’s Mehmet Can Mertoglu about a couple in Antalya who fake a pregnancy to cover up an adoption. “The accent is on first works, new visual language, good storytelling from young generations,” says Purivatra. Presiding over the jury is Palestinian auteur Elia Suleiman.

The CineLink co-production market will introduce roughly 15 handpicked regional film projects to some 70 select international industry pros, including reps from Germany’s Medienboard Berlin- Brandenburg film funding organization. Purivatra is also launching an initiative called Dealing With the Past, which he hopes will become an open source for stories that can help heal wounds of past confl icts in the former Yugoslavia. “We believe that in order to deal with many unresolved issues left by the confl ict in the former Yugoslavia, the impact of which is still widely felt today, we need sincere, clear-eyed discussion around a painful past,” says Purivatra. The project is set up in collaboration with several NGOs to collect those stories and offer them to directors, producers, and TV commissioning editors. Six will be pitched to industryites at a True Stories Market.

This news has been read 5283 times!