Sarajevo 23

The London-based sales agent has announced its acquisition for international sales of Nemanja Vojinović’s ‘western’ documentary Bottlemen. The Serbian-Slovenian film will world premiere at the upcoming Sarajevo Film Festival in Documentary competition, where it will compete for the Heart of Sarajevo award.

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.

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.

Directed by Nenad Čičin-Šain and written by Čičin-Šain and Bill Carter, the film showcases the struggle of the citizens of Sarajevo during the city’s siege during the Bosnian War and the post-war concert performed by U2 “to help shine a light when the world wasn't paying attention.” The film is produced by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck for Pearl Street Films and Sarah Anthony for Good Wolves Productions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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 $5000 Docu Talent Award was split between the Ukrainian A Picture to Remember and the Czech-Slovak co-production Chronicle. The DAFilms.com Distribution Award was awarded to An Almost Perfect Family by Romanian director Tudor Platon. During the August 13 pitch event, Ji.hlava IDFF also announced the participants within the Emerging Producers 2024 programme and unveiled its East West Index 2023.