Interviews

Petra Seliškar’s Body, about her lifelong friendship with her best friend Urška both in their carefree days and after Urška was struck down by auto-immune disease, has its Macedonian premiere August 21 following its world-premiere last week in Sarajevo. “I tried to focus on the inner development of [Urška’s] disease…her inner struggle and what really happened to her body,” Seliškar tells Business Doc Europe.

In the powerful and moving I’m Still Here, which world-premieres August 19, we are returned to the early days of the pandemic as the plight of London’s homeless is addressed full-on by the community aid organisation Under One Sky. In the film we meet some of the capital’s homeless, and the volunteers who dedicate their time to help alleviate the suffering on the streets. Co-director Franc Vissers talks to BDE.

In their debut feature doc My Muslim Husband the filmmakers, a married couple, turn their camera on themselves. “In the beginning, I thought it was going to be easy. We would film something and then we would have a movie. That was not the case. It was much more complicated,” Lizeta observes to BDE of what turned out to be a deeply personal and complex affair.

When, 12 years ago, Goran Dević turned up at a railway station in the Balkans to start filming a bitter strike, he thought he was simply doing research for a fiction script. Little did he know it would turn into a feature doc selected for Sarajevo Doc Competition. “They opened themselves to me from the first moment they saw me,” Dević remembers of the union leaders he got to know. “After that, I stayed with them.”

Five new projects were pitched August 14 during Cinelink’s Docu Rough Cut Boutique, the regional platform dedicated to upcoming documentaries at advanced editing stage. Organised in three modules (Budapest, Sofia, and Sarajevo) the projects compete for a slew of cash and in-kind prizes. “There are so many interesting and relevant stories to be told, and the world wants to know these stories,” programme head Rada Sešic told BDE.

“I was lucky to meet these amazing people who opened their lives to me, their personalities and their universe,” director Giorgi Parkosadze tells BDE of Guri and his mother Sanata, living in a remote mountainous gorge in Georgia and the subjects of the documentary Requiem to the Hot Days of Summer, screening in Sarajevo’s Documentary Competition.

For Sarajevo-born Miroslav Mandic, nature doesn't exist merely to be exploited by the human species. Because when it is, it has a tendency to bite back - with tsunamis, earthquakes or pandemics. In his short film Hug, nature is in the ascendant, its beauty, power and subtlety revealed against a dramatic soundscape which itself finds counterpoint within a dynamic modernist score. The director explains his rationale to Business Doc Europe.

“Kiss the future!” rock star Bono of band U2 shouted at the crowd during the historic concert in Sarajevo in 1997. The city was then emerging from siege and war. It was time, the Irishman was telling them, to look forward after the years of horror. The story behind the concert, and how it happened, is told in the feature doc directed by Nenad Cicin-Sain and written by Bill S Carter, who speaks to Business Doc Europe.

The full title of Sovran Nrecaj’s short doc in Sarajevo Competition is Fran and Verka: Or A Usual Day In An Abandoned Village, in which Sovran Nrecaj follows the last two folk left in a tiny parish following the 1999 war in Kosovo. The film is the first of a series of micro-histories from the region that the director wants to tell, “to bring these stories back from under the radar and diversify the already existing narratives,” Nrecaj tells BDE.

In her debut feature doc shot over six years Eléonore Boissinot chronicles the lives of two Muslim sisters in Ahmedabad, a city within the Hindu-majority Indian state of Gujarat. What seems at first a domestic story of teenage frustration evolves into a political rites of passage as the girls come to understand their tragic past and how it was shaped, in 2002, by a sectarian massacre that claimed 69 lives, among them ten members of their own family. The director talks to BDE.