28th Sarajevo Film Festival with Rada Sesic

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[August 11, 2022] Twenty-eight years ago, a group of culture workers organized a ten-day International Film Festival as an act of resistance to restore the spirit of the inhabitants of Sarajevo as they endured what would become the longest siege of a capital city in modern history.

Since then, the Sarajevo Film Festival has continued its tradition of exhibiting international films for its people and attracting a large international audience. Today, the festival is highly regarded as one of the leading and most interesting film festivals in Europe and a key meeting point for the film industry to discover emerging filmmakers from the region. 

This year, the Documentary Competition will present 22 films, eight of which are world premieres.

To help guide our festival experience, we invited Rada Šešić, who leads the selection of films for this section, to provide a little texture around this year's collection of films. 

We cover a range of topics, including the festival's origins, industry activities and initiatives the festival offers documentary filmmakers from the region, and a highlight of some of the films in the line-up. 

Articles and films referenced in this episode include:

  • MODERN TIMES REVIEW, Interview with Rada Sesic by Steve Rickinson

  • BIGGER THAN TRAUMA Croatia, 2022, 91 min. Director: Vedrana Pribačić

  • PAYING A VISIT TO FORTUNA Hungary, Croatia, 2022, 74 min. Director: Mátyás Kálmán

  • THE CHALICE. OF SONS AND DAUGHTERS Romania, 2022, 83 min. Director: Cătălina Tesăr, Dana Bunescu

  • DIARY OF A BRIDE OF CHRIST Ukraine, 2021, 90 min. Director: Marta Smerechynska

  • LITURGY OF ANTI-TANK OBSTACLES Ukraine, USA, 2022, 12 min. Director: Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk

  • SHADOWED BY THE PLANE TREE Azerbaijan, 2022, 18 min.

  • BABAJANJA Croatia, 2022, 13 min. Director: Ante Zlatko Stolica

  • FRAGILE MEMORY by Igor Ivanko - Ukraine, 2022, 85 min.

DOCS IN ORBIT x SARAJEVO CURATED WATCH LIST

DOCUMENTARY FILM COMPETITION

  • ANOTHER SPRING by Mladen Kovačević - Serbia, France, Qatar, 2022, 90 min.

  • LITURGY OF ANTI-TANK OBSTACLES by Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk - Ukraine, USA, 2022, 12 min

  • THE CHALICE. OF SONS AND DAUGHTERS by Cătălina Tesăr, Dana Bunescu - Romania, 2022, 83 min.

  • BABAJANJA by Ante Zlatko Stolica - Croatia, 2022, 13 min.

  • DIARY OF A BRIDE OF CHRIST by Marta Smerechynska - Ukraine, 2021, 90 min.

FIVE FILMS FROM OTHER SECTIONS NOT TO MISS!

  • REWIND & PLAY By Alain Gomis - France, Germany, 2022, 65 min.

  • HAULOUT by Evgenia Arbugaeva, Maxim Arbugaev - UK, Russia, 2022, 25 min.

  • CHERRIES by Vytautas Katkus - Lithuania, 2022, 15 min

  • THE FENCE By Tomasz Wolski - Poland, 2022, 26 min.

  • UNDER THE LAKE by Thanasis Trouboukis - Greece, Finland, 2022, 17 min.

Rada Sesic, Programmer at Sarajevo Film Festival

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.

Christina Zachariades, Docs in Orbit

Christina Zachariades is a researcher, filmmaker, and founder of Docs in Orbit. She holds a Master of Arts from the University of Texas in Austin, and Master of Arts in Documentary Film Directing from DocNomads. 

She was a 2020 Artist Fellow at UnionDocs Collaborative Studio and was invited to give a talk to the 2021 Talents Sarajevo for up-and-coming film critics and journalists from Southeast Europe and the Southern Caucasus. She is also part of the screening committee at the Camden International Film Festival.