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 in Bosnian history (which I’m augmenting with Marko Attila Hoare’s recent history of the region, which is particularly helpful in the way it unpicks and demythologises the roots of its many conflicting nationalism), and just about the first thing I spotted on my arrival this time round was a number of pieces of graffiti, all by the same hand and in the same blood-red paint, exhorting us to remember Srebrenica. (Many of these were bilingual in Bosnian and English, like the dual-layer subtitles accompanying most of the films).
I don’t know whether the graffiti predated Karadžić’s capture, but few attending the festival are likely to forget Srebrenica, as it looms large in both the programme and even the titles of such films as Haris Prolić’s Srebrenica Cenotaph, constructed from (literally) unearthed camcorder footage of Srebrenica residents as they eked out an uncertain existence between 1992-4. The massacre also unavoidably dominated Adnan Ćuhara’s The Seeker (Tragač), an hour-long portrait of Amor Mašović, the director of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Missing Persons Institute, who has spent fifteen years examining the evidence revealed by mass graves. Both will be reviewed at greater length later this week.