Sarajevo Film Festival

Marta's photo of festival posters in the river
The 12th Sarajevo Film Festival ended this weekend, marking the real end of summer. I got to see three films in the big open-air theater set up near the river. It is a festive place to go, a lot like drive-in movies of my youth. I was, however, completely unprepared for how cold it can get at night in mid-August near the Miljacka. I had on long sleeves and was shivering. Nearly everyone else had on jackets, hoods and blankets, as I did on my second night.

The Film Festival began when the war was still on. About 15,000 defiant Sarajevans met in basements in three buildings to watch movies and act like a community despite the siege they were under. This year 100,000 people came. The giant screen set up outdoors has been a fixture since the early years of the festival. As soon as the war ended, people amassed outside again.

The films I watched -- one American, one Latin American and one Australian -- will not be counted among my favorites, but I love the festival. Lucy, an American lawyer here gave a good explanation when I, she and others feel like that. Bosnians love movies and it's fun watching them watch movies. They are not impolite -- in fact when Lucy at one film couldn't find an empty seat and sat down in the aisle on a step, teen-agers immediately rearranged themselves and opened up a seat for her in the middle of a row.

When they identify with a character they applaud and yell out. She watched a film in which a young man asks a girl if she observes Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting. When she said yes he began ranting against how much he disliked people who did not observe, whereupon she tells him, I fast but I don't pass judgement on those who don't. The crowd cheered her. Obviously an issue that is discussed in this Muslim but secular city.

Some young people here say they don't go to the festival much because there're too many films about war. Actually that seems true, if not about the Bosnian war, the movies the past couple of years have been heavy with topics such as the Holocaust, or WWII or Rwanda or the Crusades.