The Sarajevo Film Festival adds Ukraine to its regional programmes
- Ukrainian films, projects and filmmakers will now be eligible for the festival's official sections, CineLink Industry Days, Talents and a newly launched residency programme
The Sarajevo Film Festival has announced that it will add Ukraine to its official sections: the Competition programmes for feature, documentary, short and student films, the In Focus programme, the CineLink Film Industry Days, as well as the Talents Sarajevo programme.
The festival will also launch a residency programme for filmmakers from Ukraine, who will work on their projects in the development and postproduction stages in Sarajevo in collaboration with leading Bosnian and international experts from the world of film, after which they will be presented at the CineLink Film Industry Days.
The Ukrainian delegation will be invited to the CineLink Film Industry Days with the aim of enhancing the collaboration with film professionals from Southeast Europe.
In an effort to symbolically mark the beginning of this collaboration, the festival posted on its YouTube channel the short film Reflections by Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, part of the 2014 omnibus Bridges of Sarajevo [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], which brought together 13 key European directors on the centenary of World War I to explore the topic of Sarajevo through their films. Loznitsa's short can be seen here.
SFF's press release says: "In this way, the Sarajevo Film Festival shows its solidarity with the Ukrainian people and filmmakers and condemns the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Launched in 1995 as an expression of cultural resistance to the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Sarajevo Film Festival knows from its own experience how valuable solidarity and support of this kind are."
The festival started off as a regional event for Balkan films, and went on to spread to all of Southeast Europe and later to the Caucasus region (notably, winners in previous years included Georgian films Brides [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Tinatin Kajrishvili
film profile] and Scary Mother [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ana Urushadze
film profile]), also adding Arab countries to its industry programme.
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