The Sarajevo Festival, Zagreb Festival, Belgrade Auteur Film Festival and Montenegro Film Festival are jointly setting up the first regional Balkan film festival.
Organised by the newly-created Network of Festivals of the Adriatic Region and with funding from the European Creative Europe programme, this Balkan film festival is the “first gathering of four major film festivals from four countries speaking the same language”: Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia and Montenegro.
Organized online from April 9th to 17th the programme is showing award-winning films from the major festivals (Cannes, Venice, Sarajevo and Berlin) on the VoD platform ondemand.kinomeetingpoint.ba.
8 films selected by the organisers will be made available to viewers in the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, North Macedonia and Montenegro):
- two classic Yugoslav films from the 1970’s, “Fragrance of Wild Flowers” by Srdjan Karanović and Puriša Djordjević’s “Pavle Pavlović”
- “New Order” by Michel Franco
- Philip Yuryev’s “The Whaler Boy”
- “Servants” by Ivan Ostrochovský
- “One of Us” by Croatian director Djuro Gavran
- “The Death of Cinema and My Father Too” by Dani Rosenberg
- Jeanette Nordahl’s “Wildland”
The four festivals want to continue collaborating after this particular 9-day event, using the programming of their own events to maintain contact: each of the festivals will present films from neighbouring countries to “bring audiences together and encourage cultural heritage and feelings of friendliness and closeness.”
For more information on the audiovisual news in the Balkans, click here.
Sources: cineuropa.org, croatiaweek.com, sff.ba, courrierdesbalkans.fr
