‘Bosnia-Herzegovina’ Archives
Back to Sarajevo
When I get a spare moment, I'm going to finish writing up my Sarajevo Film Festival reviews (I haven't even mentioned the documentaries yet, of which I saw a great many), but in the meantime here's Dominic Ambrose's blog - he also attended the festival and wrote capsule pieces on many of the films, including a few that I didn't see.
Snow Q&A
One of the better films I saw at this year's Sarajevo Film Festival was Aida Begić's feature debut Snow (Snijeg) - but though I attended the press Q&A the next day, it was all in untranslated Bosnian (or at least the first ten minutes was: I'd made my excuses and left by then).So I was delighted to find Michael Guillen's English-language [...]
Sarajevo Snapshot 3
It's only when I actually visited Sarajevo for the first time that I realised just how peculiarly susceptible the city is to being beseiged, surrounded as it is by hills and forests offering ample opportunities for snipers. The recent capture of Radovan Karadžić led many British newspapers to offer what turned out to be well-timed crash-courses [...]
Tractor, Love and Rock’n’Roll
Traktor, ljubav i rock'n'roll Slovenia/Bosnia-Herzegovina, 2008, colour, 105 mins Boasting not just the most self-parodically ‘Eastern European’ title of anything playing in the 2008 Sarajevo Film Festival but also arguably this entire blog, director/co-writer/star Branko Đurić’s film is an extremely broad comedy set entirely in a [...]
Sarajevo Snapshot 2
On his first visit in the 1960s, Roman Polanski apparently observed that London was "a very red city" thanks to the Routemaster buses, phone and letter boxes, etc. There's plenty of red here in Sarajevo too, thanks to the many, many Film Festival posters, but the colour that I keep encountering in the city centre is green, whether the vertiginous [...]
Snow
Snijeg Bosnia-Herzegovina/Germany/France/Iran, 2008, colour, 100 minsThe Sarajevo Film Festival got off to a strong start last night with the Bosnian premiere of Aida Begić’s debut feature, already the winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes’ Semaine de la Critique. If it initially seemed incongruous that a small-scale drama whose most telling [...]
Sarajevo Snapshot 1
Judging from my own experience, and conversations with people who'd last visited Sarajevo four or five years ago, the festival's budget has been growing year on year, and a good sign of this was in the lavishness of the opening night party. It was pretty good in 2006, held in a hillside restaurant overlooking the city's twinkling lights, but all [...]
Sarajevo 2006/2008
When I started this blog just over a year ago, I did so with a long list of ambitions, chief among them being that I was going to keep the promise of its subtitle "a survey of Central and Eastern European cinema" by visiting the Gdynia, Plzeň, Budapest and Sarajevo Film Festivals every year and thereby end up sampling the vast majority of the [...]
Best Foreign Film Oscar longlist announced
According to the Hollywood Reporter, a record 63 films are on the initial longlist for the Best Foreign Film Oscar. The full list is here, and these are the Central and Eastern European submissions: Azerbaijan: Caucasia (d. Farid Gumbatov) Bosnia and Herzegovina: It's Hard to Be Nice/Teško je biti fin (d. Srđan Vuletić) - [...]