REUTERS:
TEN YEARS is not long in the life of a film festival. But the Sarajevo Film Festival, which opens tomorrow, has evolved over the last decade from a gathering of film fans defiantly watching Western productions under the threat of artillery to a major regional event creating new stars.
"It all began as a project," said festival director Miro Purivatra. "But what has been achieved exceeded our expectations."
180 MOVIES TO BE SHOWN
The festival will show about 180 movies and welcome some 500 guests from the film industry, including such stars as John Malkovich, Gerard Depardieu and Carole Bouquet.
The organisers expect more than 100,000 people to attend, equivalent to a quarter of the city's population.
The festival was launched in November 1995, with the help of the directors of the Locarno and Edinburgh film festivals who arrived in besieged Sarajevo through an underground tunnel to bring the first film tapes in three years to culture-hungry Sarajevans.
TURNING POINT
Purivatra was the driving force behind a team who organised a war cinema in a basement as an act of resistance to the 3-1/2-year Bosnian Serb siege of the city, during which nearly 12,000 people were killed.
The festival was held at the same time as peace talks were under way in Dayton, Ohio to end the 1992-5 war.
"The first festival was like a turning point between war and peace it had started while the war was still on and ended after the peace agreement was reached," said Izeta Gradjevic, the festival's art director and one of its founders.
The organisers dreamed of an outdoor cinema where people would watch movies without fear of grenades from the surrounding hills.
"It seemed like madness back then," said technical director Almir Palata, talking about how the following year they turned a school playground into an open air cinema with 2,500 seats.
"We had millions of problems. The biggest of all is that Bosnia is a poor country where there are not even enough cinemas to show movies," said Purivatra.
Nine films from Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Romania, Slovenia and Serbia and Montenegro will compete for awards.
Bosnia, whose Fuse by director Pjer Zalica was the winner last year, will not be represented in this year's competition, but Zalica's new film will open the festival.
"This is a big region of 40 million people that requires its own space. We want regional authors, who cannot make it to the European major festivals, to have Sarajevo as a natural choice for showing their films," said Purivatra.
