Europeanizing the Balkans at the Sarajevo Film Festival

Abstract

Europeanizing the Balkans at the Sarajevo Film Festival Kristine Kotecki (bio) Two security guards in black suits block the fenced-in red carpet leading to the National Theatre in Sarajevo. One of them explains to the crowd pressed up against the gate that entry will be limited to film professionals with a “Press”-level festival pass for this screening. Even in the heat of the midday July sun, the crowd does not disperse. Eventually the guards stare stone-faced ahead, ignoring the sustained protests of people with tickets and lower-level festival passes. Many in the mostly Bosnian-speaking crowd dressed up for this 11:30 AM screening of Jasmina (2010), one of the two Bosnia-Herzegovinian films in this year’s competition program at the Sarajevo Film Festival (SFF). The director, actors, and other film professionals will walk the red carpet to attend the 10:30 PM screening later in the evening, but unless the film secures a distributor, the residents of Sarajevo may not have another opportunity to view it. Jasmina, a sentimental tale about a baby sent to the Croatian coast while her parents stay in Sarajevo to resist the siege, was directed by Nedžad Begović, a Bosnian filmmaker best known for his documentary coverage of the 1992–96 siege of Sarajevo for SAGA Productions. Begović’s wartime film credits and the film’s theme of families fragmented by the war challenge the “festivity” of the festival (e.g., red carpet, cocktail receptions, fireworks). War-themed films like Jasmina and Sevdah for Karim (2010), the other Bosnia-Herzegovinian competition film, which [End Page 344] follows a now-adult war orphan as he clears mines and deals with war trauma, add an element of public mourning to the festival. The persistence of films thematizing the war—such films have been included in the festival programming since its foundation in 1993—suggests, however, public melancholia more than the working-through of mourning, to use Sigmund Freud’s terms.1 Melancholia, which Freud defines as a pathology whereby the ego cannot detach from the lost object, may nonetheless have productive potential, as David Eng and David Kazanjian suggest. They argue that a continual melancholic return to loss allows for an open engagement with the past: “By engaging in ‘countless separate struggles’ with loss, melancholia might be said to constitute, as Benjamin would describe it, an ongoing and open relationship with the past—bringing its ghosts and specters, its flaring and fleeting images, into the present” (4). The melancholic return to nation-at-war insists on a narrative at odds with the festival’s current mission of enabling peaceful and productive transnational cooperation. Promoted as a festival for the nations comprising Southeast Europe, the SFF is officially presented as exemplifying a progressive move from ethnic nationalist “Balkanization” to transnational cultural engagement. The festival’s publicly stated goals therefore function as a frame for the films and events that occur at the festival; every film and forum shown hypothetically represents progress toward peaceful transnationalism. The meaning attached to the films screened at the festival will therefore be filtered and, possibly, delimited by this frame. In comprising a community announced to be more progressive than the national, the transnational festival produces a narrative of Southeast European regional belonging. The festival’s political role as an example of constructive transnational collaboration plays out alongside the exigency of its more practical role of increasing investment, especially Western European investment, in Southeast European culture. Much of the activity at the SFF revolves around attracting attention to films at various stages of their production, as film professionals attend the numerous co-production and networking forums for production and distribution support. The loss of much of the state funding for culture that existed during socialist Yugoslavia has exacerbated the challenge of funding regional films. Films that promise an economic return that exceeds what can reasonably be attained at the national level are therefore more likely to secure co-producers and film-fund sponsorship (Iordanova “The Cinema”). Southeast European [End Page 345] filmmakers with limited access to the capital of more dominant film industries develop relationships at the SFF that facilitate collaborative filmmaking; the financial relationships it enables...