From 1992 to 1996, Serbian forces laid siege to the city of Sarajevo, relentlessly bombarding it and cutting off electricity, heat, running water and regular food supplies. Because of snipers perched on hillsides and constant shelling, going outside was a life-threatening act.
Yet these were the conditions under which the Sarajevo Film Festival came to life. Now celebrating its 30th anniversary, the festival, which runs through Friday, has grown to become the premier movie industry event for the Balkan region. But its roots still define its character.
After the breakup of Yugoslavia, ethnic tensions in Bosnia deepened, resulting in a violent nationalistic campaign led by Bosnian Serbs targeting Bosniaks and Croats. When war broke out in Sarajevo, Mirsad Purivatra, the festival’s founder, was living in a cellar with other members of what he called a “punk” collective — artist types who worked in theater, music and film, many of whom were involved with the University of Sarajevo’s Academy of Performing Arts.
“After a few months, we figured out how to survive physically, but then we asked ourselves: ‘How are we going to survive mentally?’” Purivatra said over coffee in a downtown square. Purivatra and his collaborators began staging performances in the cellar and inviting artists to create installations in the underground passages that Sarajevans used to move around the city.
Eventually, word of these efforts got around to the international press, which inspired writers and artists from outside of Bosnia to visit Sarajevo and raise awareness of the city’s plight through acts of cultural solidarity. Susan Sontag, for instance, brought a candlelight production of “Waiting for Godot” to life with Bosnian actors and theater experts.
The logistics of creating a movie theater without electricity seemed impossible, but Purivatra relayed the desire to Sontag and her son, David Reiff — two of the besieged arts community’s most important allies — who then discussed the issue with troops from a United Nations mission that was delivering humanitarian aid. A few weeks later, “two guys came knocking on our door with a generator and fifty liters of gasoline,” Purivatra recalled.
At first, the organizers screened VHS tapes from the performing arts academy’s libraries once a week. But as time passed and their international network grew, the programming at their scrappy cinema — entrance fee: one cigarette — became increasingly impressive. The director Phil Alden Robinson (“Field of Dreams”) arrived as part of a humanitarian mission with a box full of Universal films; Alfonso Cuarón brought his latest movie “A Little Princess” (1995) and the French filmmaker Leos Carax (“Annette”) came with 35-mm prints of his work.
The screening schedule was increased to once a day; the films would start at 6 p.m. so that attendees could make it home before the city’s 10 p.m. curfew. With the help of the U.N. and the Bosnian Army, heavy film reels were transported into the city via the underground channels used to bring in essential supplies.
While other independent groups around Sarajevo also arranged screenings and performances, Purivatra’s collective was intent on creating a legitimate festival and becoming “part of the world the way it should be, with real projectors and technical professionalism,” Purivatra said. “It was our form of resistance.”
When the screenings of the first festival took place, the siege was still in full swing, so they were held in a large, well-protected synagogue known today as the Bosnian Cultural Center.
Jasmila Zbanic, whose Oscar-nominated feature “Quo Vadis, Aida?” (2020) tells the story of the massacre in Srebrenica, a town east of Sarajevo, was a student filmmaker at the Academy of Performing Arts at the time. The school faced closures and severe disruptions, but it managed to resume some classes. “Institutions all over fought to reopen,” Zbanic said in an interview.
Film students like Zbanic found a lifeline in the city’s underground movie theater. “I remember attending one of the screenings in the cellar — even in the summer it was always freezing cold down there. We watched Aki Kaurismaki’s ‘The Match Factory Girl,’” Zbanic said. A VHS copy of the film was shipped over by programmers from the Berlin International Film Festival. When, years later, Zbanic was asked to present a formative film at the same festival, her choice was obvious. “That movie, the decision to send and screen it, changed my life,” she said.
Zbanic was still at the academy when the Sarajevo Film Festival launched its first edition, and she immediately signed up to volunteer.
“The whole thing felt like one big family project at first,” Zbanic explained, adding that in the festival’s early years, she and the other volunteers would help foreign journalists find accommodation with local hosts. Later, Zbanic briefly worked as one of the festival’s programmers before turning her focus to filmmaking full time.
The festival was “a symbol of what the region could and should look like,” Zbanic said, because during the event, people were “happy to cooperate, and building something beautiful.”
“But the rest of the year it’s very different — very distressing — because we have these politicians that have built their careers on division and conflict,” Zbanic added. Although the festival still lacks the infrastructure and funding of older and bigger regional festivals in Croatia and Serbia, it had “grown and transformed much faster, because its organizers aren’t interested in propaganda or nationalistic conceptions of Bosnian culture,” she added.
Jovan Marjanovic, the current director of Sarajevo Film Festival, began working for the organization over 20 years ago as a projectionist. “It’s the 30th anniversary, so obviously we need to look back, but that’s always been part of the festival’s DNA,” Marjanovic said, pointing to a long-running section called “Dealing with the Past” that highlights films addressing issues related not only to history of the former Yugoslavia, but also to recent turmoil in places like Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian territories.
“When the festival first started, it was about reconstruction — about calling attention to landmarks that still serve a purpose and need to be rebuilt,” Marjanovic said. “But now we’re done with reconstructing buildings ruined by the war,” he added. “We’re about new talent. New energy. We want to look to the future.”