Sarajevo introducing a new award for promoting gender equality

by Vladan Petkovic

11/08/2021 - 13 films across various sections will be vying for the €7,500 prize; the festival has also announced its Dealing with the Past programme

Sarajevo introducing a new award for promoting gender equality

Murina by Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović

The Sarajevo Film Festival, which runs from 13-20 August this year, has announced that it is introducing a new prize: the Award for Promoting Gender Equality. The trophy, worth €7,500 and sponsored by Mastercard, will be handed to a first feature film directed by a woman, chosen from among titles in the Feature Competition, Documentary Competition, In Focus, Dealing with the Past and Kinoscope sections.

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The jury consists of festival programmers and curators Teresa Cavina (Italy) and Lorna Tee (Malaysia/Netherlands), and Serbian director Ognjen Glavonić.

Sarajevo has also announced this year's Dealing with the Past programme, which has the goal of conducting honest dialogue about the region’s recent past as a prerequisite for resolving the problems of the present that stem from the Yugoslav Wars. This year’s programme is divided into two sections, one of which focuses on seeking the truth by using both conventional and unconventional methods. This strand includes three films by Mads Brügger, The Ambassador, Cold Case Hammarskjöld [+see also:
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interview: Mads Brügger
interview: Mads Brügger
film profile] and The Mole: Undercover in North Korea, plus the international premiere of Bullets over Marseille, in which Serbian director Gordan Matić presents a new take on the 1934 assassination of Aleksandar I of Yugoslavia.

The second section of the programme is focused on the conflicts that have yet to be resolved and their long-lasting impact on the communities affected by them. The films in this section include the world premiere of Maysoon Pachachi’s Our River… Our Sky (UK/UAE/Qatar/ Kuwait/Iraq/Germany/France) as well as The Voice of Ahmad, an anthology of seven short works about Arabs working in Israel, revolving around the 1966 film I Am Ahmad, and Najwa Najjar’s Between Heaven and Earth [+see also:
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