The 14th Sarajevo Film Festival kicked off Friday with a screening of Aida Begic s debut feature Snow, about life in a village in postwar Bosnia.The movie was honored in May in a Cannes competition overseen by critics.
Over nine days, the Sarajevo festival born in a sandbag-protected basement during the Bosnian war, will show 174 movies from 40 countries. Last year the international event, which aims to support and promote cinema and authors in Southeast Europe, attracted some 100,000 people.
This year s festival will welcome Kevin Spacey and Charlie Kaufman, as well as regional stars and filmmakers.
The festival started in 1994 in besieged Sarajevo when a few young people tried to offer citizens some sense of normal life. Founder Miro Purivatra, who before the war organized cultural events in the city, thought that residents were hungry for culture as well as for food and organized a showing of Quentin Tarantino s Pulp Fiction.
During the projection powered by a generator, the handful of viewers wondered whether the sound of the shooting came from the loudspeakers or from the battles outside the basement.
International media reported about the unusual event in the middle of a war zone. Several international filmmakers thought the idea should be supported and the next year shipped boxes of movie tapes to Sarajevo with food deliveries.
Partially thanks to the festival, Bosnia s cinema has begun to boom despite the country s poverty. The country has since seen its filmmakers gain prestigious film awards like the foreign-film Oscar for Danis Tanovic s No Man s Land in 2002 and the Golden Bear in Berlin for Jasmila Zbanic s Grbavica in 2006. -AP
