The Sarajevo Film Festival has gone from strength to strength, becoming a big draw for international stars
SITTING DOWN with Mirsad Purivatra, director of the Sarajevo Film Festival, amidst the buzz of its 15th anniversary celebrations, I’m only too aware that the man beside me started this tiny project in a sandbagged office while fighting raged outside on the streets. As Mirsad tells it, “we felt we had to do something and there was such energy”.
The Sarajevo Film Festival this year hosted over 220 films from 53 countries, and all on a budget that an oligarch might spend on his second or third wedding.
We are just starting to talk about what makes the festival such a draw for international stars – including Daniel Craig, Mickey Rourke, Juliette Binoche, Steve Buscemi, Michael Moore and Gillian Anderson – when Jim Sheridan ambles in, hot, tired and in need of a phone charger. Moments later, gripping a frosted coke, borrowed charger in hand, he tells the story of his first attempt to come to Sarajevo in 1995, when he, Terry George ( Hotel Rwanda), Vanessa Redgrave and Jeremy Irons tried and failed to board a UNHCR aircraft to join a resupply mission into the city then under siege.
According to Terry George, they were stopped by a British officer, though Sheridan’s take is that they were going to cause too many logistical and security problems by hitching a ride into a war zone to visit a film festival. A decade later and Sheridan has finally made it here, joining an ever-growing cadre of friends of Sarajevo, who year after year return to support the festival’s youth talent campus in developing the next generation of film-makers, revelling in the warm reception and sense of democracy that imbues the event.
To illustrate how different it is, Sheridan recounts a story about the Cannes Film Festival, where he turned up with Terry George to a screening of their own film. After walking up the red carpet, they were informed that the screening was full, as minders ushered them down a corridor and through a metal door, locked out of their own film.
Mirsad Purivatra, charming and multi-cultural, is the personification of all that entices the beau monde of film and its rebels to come visit. Of course, among the enormously impressive list of celebrities is Bono Vox, as he is known here. A stalwart supporter of the country and the festival for many years, a dedication which earned Bono and his family honorary Bosnian passports in 1997, when U2 performed on their Pop Mart tour in Sarajevo.
Bono’s Bosnian citizenship became the focus of a major dispute last weekend, with Bosnian Serb officials claiming that the country’s laws do not allow for the conferral of honorary citizenships.
Some Sarajevo media organisations and Bosnian officials saw this as another attempt by Bosnian Serb officials to undermine Bosnia’s symbols of statehood. The dispute was apparently triggered by Bono’s recent statements during U2 concerts in Zagreb, Croatia, where he said that his Bosnian passport was one of his most treasured possessions.
Sadly, as the Sarajevo Film Festival has gone from strength to strength, Bosnia has been sliding downwards. When I ask Mirsad Purivatra about this, he says: “Yes, things have got worse politically, the politicians now are in it for themselves first, their party second and the people a distant third”, and still playing on nationalist fears at election time to maintain their grip.
In what seemed like a parallel universe at a raucous but good-humoured festival wrap party, Mirsad Purivatra sat among film-makers and fans looking exhausted but happy. And as if to underline the ethos of the event, a Serbian anti-war film, Ordinary People, picked up the coveted Heart of Sarajevo award at the festival's closing ceremony.
In the wee hours, as the revellers headed home past the Catholic cathedral in the centre of town, they passed another group of people heading to a mosque for the first day of Ramadan.
Mirsad Purivatra for president of Bosnia? They could do worse.