A balmy late afternoon in Sarajevo: the Muezzin call to prayer snakes through the air, mingling with the smoke of scores of charcoal grills and spitting lamb skewers. Although the city is filled with mosques, orthodox Christian churches and the odd synagogue, meat is the real religion here in Bosnia, that and cigarettes. Fatty tendrils of kebab-smoke cling to the terracotta roof tiles in the old Ottoman quarter, blending with the tobacco fumes that swath every waking moment in the Bosnian capital. So when for nine days in August every year the city gathers to worship at the altar of cinema, it is only natural that the Sarajevans find a way to incorporate at least one of their other passions.
Hence the Sarajevo Film Festival’s celebrated open air screenings. Two outdoor cinemas are rigged up during the festival. The larger – the Heineken Open Air Cinema – plays host to 3000 people each night. It’s a testament to the popularity of the festival that there is rarely a seat to spare. There’s an electric atmosphere. The Sarajevans are dressed to impress. Young women in sparkly stiletto sandals totter unsteadily past, like Bambi on stilts. Even while the films are playing the air is filled with boisterous chatter and cigarette smoke. Pedro Almodóvar’s striking Broken Embraces (pictured) has a new beauty here, filtered as it is through a soft focus haze of incinerated Ronhill cigarettes. Cigarette girls, nymph-like in their white satin mini-dresses, make sure that no mouth is left wanting for a nicotine nipple.
The festival period, explains volunteer driver Emir, is the best time in the entire year to visit the city. People travel from all over Bosnia to join in the celebration of this little film festival, which punches well above its weight on the international circuit. The festival is celebrating its fifteenth year. When it started, the city was still under the stranglehold of the siege. Films had to be smuggled into the city, along with medical supplies and food rations, through a tunnel which ran under the UN protected airfield and linked the city island with the outside world. Rather than risk the sniper’s bullets on the main street, festival audiences preferred to climb through a mortar hole in the side wall of the cinema.
Although bullet holes still riddle many buildings throughout the city, times have certainly changed. Vocal supporters like Mike Leigh and Kevin Spacey have given the festival kudos, sponsors have brought glitz and a red carpet, along with the cigarette-nymphs and Bosnian beauties in aggressively branded T-shirts. But the spirit of defiance and pride, which defined the festival from the very start, remains. And while Emir the driver, who was five-years-old during the siege, argues that it’s time that filmmakers from the former Yugoslavia found something to talk about other than the war, it’s clear that there are still plenty of raw memories and stories to be told.
One of the best films of the first two days was Donkey, a co-production from Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. Set in 1995, it’s a sun-bleached story of bad blood between the men of a family dispersed to the far corners of the warring former Yugoslavian states. The characters glare balefully at each other over half-empty bottles of red wine; the score is evocatively minimal – just a mournful cello and the nagging sound of cicadas. Over two weeks in the scorched lands surrounding the village of Drinovci, a kind of taciturn understanding is reached. And yes, a donkey plays his part.
The overwhelmingly positive response suggests that Sarajevan audiences have not lost their appetite for tales of their recent history just yet.
