Confronting the Past Programme at the 28th Sarajevo Film Festival

(Patria) - The Confronting the Past Programme at the 28th Sarajevo Film Festival will feature directors who have gained fame with films about real events, and new directors who re-examine the position of individuals whose lives have been marked by trauma from the recent past.

The programme will open with Ari Folman's cult film WALTZ WITH BASHIR, based on the author's personal experience while serving in the Israeli army in 1982. We are very pleased to share Ari's latest film WHERE IS ANNE FRANK? with the audience.

We will also host Michael Winterbottom, a cinematic giant strongly connected to Sarajevo, who will present his latest film ELEVEN DAYS IN MAY, directed with Mohammad Sawaf. It is also important to note that Ari Folman and Michael Winterbottom will have audience talks as part of the Masterclass programme of the 28th Sarajevo Film Festival. We will also present the work of Dutch director Mijke de Jong's THE END OF THE ROAD. In addition, the audience will be able to recall the fates of the residents of Vukovar in 1991 and 2008 in Eduard Galić's film THE SIXTH BUS. American director Joseph Pierson, in the film WHAT IS THIS COUNTRY CALLED NOW?, presents the inspiring story of Bosnian-Herzegovinian journalist Aida Čerkez from the period of the siege of Sarajevo.

The second part of the programme is led by a new generation of filmmakers, such as Nataša Urban, who in her award-winning film ECLIPSE uses an astrological event from 1999 as a leitmotif for the collective trauma of Serbian society after the recent wars in the former Yugoslavia. In the programme, we will also present the film B4 by Bosnian-Herzegovinian author Alen Šimić about his return home, to the place where his parents were killed. The film CUT by Serbian director Davor Marinković offers an insight into the lives of people displaced by war who have been living in refugee camps ever since,” said Maša Marković, manager of the Confronting the Past programme.

The Confronting the Past Programme will also host 30 young people from the Western Balkans region within the "Youth Perspective" section, which includes a series of panel discussions, closed talks, and debates on peace activism and reconciliation practices, and is organized in cooperation with the Regional Youth Cooperation Office, the Civil Forum for Peace Service – ForumZFD, and the PRO-Bosnia and Herzegovina project of the United States Agency for International Development.  

The Confronting the Past Programme is realized with the support of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) Foundation.