Sarajevo 23

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.

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 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.

Programmer Rada Šešić has devised a selection of 20 docs, featuring nine world, one international, seven regional and three B&H premieres. Filmmakers will compete for four awards including the Heart of Sarajevo for Best Documentary Film, valued at €4,000 and sponsored by the Government of Switzerland. The 29th edition of Sarajevo FF runs 11-18 August.

Berlin-based producer Loránd Balázs Imre and Hungarian director András Földes (also a conflict zone reporter whose work has garnered him a Pulitzer Memorial Prize) pitched their new doc, which addresses the dire threat to press freedom in contemporary Hungary. “I aim to create a powerful and emotionally resonant film about the struggle between autocratic forces and human groups committed to freedom,” Földes explains.

Winner of the DAFilms.com Distribution Award following its Docu Talents from the East pitch this week, Romanian Tudor Platon’s highly personal new doc will explore “the different shapes that love can take between parents and children, and children who become parents themselves.” Producer Carla Fotea (who is also a crucial onscreen presence in the film) pitched the project in Sarajevo.

“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.

20 films feature in the festival’s designated Doc Competition, while non-fiction is also prominent within the Dealing With The Past and Kinoscope programmes. The 29th edition opens August 11 with Nenad Čičin-Šain’s U2 doc Kiss The Future. Additionally, the festival’s professional arm Cinelink Industry Days presents a slew of dynamic new doc projects from the region, plus talks and debates.

The brutal realities facing the LGBTQ and homelessness communities in modern-day Hungary make for stark contrast to the rather fanciful title of Gergő Somogyvári’s delicate, engaging and rather warm-hearted doc, which follows the unlikely friendship between 19-year-old trans Fanni and the solitary 60-year-old homeless Laci.

Three projects scooped the six awards during the August 17 closing ceremony of CineLink Industry Days. These were the Georgian Adelina: Symphony of Longing and Estrangement by Rati Tsiteladzea; Your Life Without Me by Anna Rubi (Hungary, Sweden); and the Croatian Pavillion 6 by Goran Dević. Docu Rough Cut Boutique is a regional platform dedicated to documentary projects in the advanced phase of the editing process.