27th Sarajevo Film Festival 2021
In the first episode, we are joined by Rada Šešić, who leads the selection of films in the Documentary Competition at the Sarajevo Film Festival.
We discuss her work as a filmmaker, critic, mentor, and film programmer. We also talk about the origins of the Sarajevo Film Festival and how it is rooted in cultural protest, review some of the films included in this year’s Documentary Competition including LOOKING FOR HORSES by Stefan Pavlović, LANDSCAPES OF RESISTANCE by Marta Popivoda, WHEN WE WERE THEM by Danis Tanović and Damir Šagolj, and the Georgian documentary film, SUNNY by Keti Machavariani.
Rada Sesič was born in former Yugoslavia and currently lives in The Netherlands. Sesič is specialized in South Asian and Eastern European cinema. She is associated with IDFA, IFFR and NIF (Dutch Institute for film education) as well as Sarajevo Film Festival and Kerala Film Festival. She teaches and gives workshops worldwide and has directed four award-winning shorts and documentaries that were screened at several festivals and also presented and archived at MoMA, New York. Visit her website here.
In the second episode, we host a roundtable discussion with filmmakers and film journalists on the ground at the Sarajevo Film Festival to digest our festival experience and recap several of the standout films. Films discussed include FACTORY TO THE WORKERS by Srđan Kovačević, THE SAME DREAM by Vlad Petri, DISTURBED EARTH by Kumjana Novakova and Guillermo Carreras-Candi , RECONCILIATION by Marija Zidar, and LOOKING FOR HORSES by Stefan Pavlović.
In the third episode, we feature a conversation with Stefan Pavlović whose film, LOOKING FOR HORSES, left quite an impression on us for its warm and intimate approach to filmmaking. LOOKING FOR HORSES is Stefan’s first feature-length film and the result of his graduate studies at the Netherlands Film Academy in Artistic Research in and through Cinema where his thesis centered on how the cinema apparatus can overcome the limits of verbal language and how the camera can be a tool to practice intimacy with and through. Facilitating the conversation is Docs in Orbit co-curator Kopal Joshy. Kopal is an Indian filmmaker and cinematographer who is currently in the process of expanding her thesis film from her MA studies in DocNomads into a feature film. In her film, Joshy chronicles her encounters with a man that lives in solitude by a lake in Portugal and engages in similar questions about filmmaking as an intimate act of sharing between two people.