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 the stops were pulled out this year – and thankfully the weather held up, as it was entirely in the open air.
The most amusing touch, at least for a Briton, was that the party was sponsored by tobacco manufacturer Ronhill, whose illuminated logos were liberally strewn around the venue. They even had cigarette girls handing them out – in London, they’d have been taken away and beaten (I smoked my first in literally years: it seemed rude to refuse). A live band played various cheesy 60s and 70s film-soundtrack standards – in what William Goldman famously called a ‘movie moment’ (by which he meant a coincidence so implausible that it seemed as though it was devised by a screenwriter), they kicked off with Nino Rota’s Amarcord at the precise moment I started chatting to an Italian journalist that I’d previously met at the airport.
A spectacular firework display kicked off at about midnight, after which there was a light show – made all the more effective by the fact that by this stage there was enough cigarette smoke in the air to fuse with the beams (this may well have been precalculated). Predictably enough, the goodie bag consisted of a selection of Ronhill products, which I’ve already earmarked for a friend.