At the 29th Sarajevo Film Festival (SFF), more than ten films about the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and other countries will be shown, two of which with a world premiere about the creation of tourist attractions at places of detention and execution sites. Films about victims of sexual abuse in Foca, teenagers from Ukraine, as well as stories about participants in the crimes will be presented to the audience.
Two films in this year’s SFF program “Dealing with the Past” – “Mamula All Inclusive” by Aleksandar Reljic and “War Souvenirs” by Georg Zeller – will have their world premiere. The stories of the films were previously presented on the “True Stories Market”.
The film “Mamula All Inclusive” is the story of Ivo Markovic, a survivor of the camp “Mamula” who opposed the decision of the Government of Montenegro to build an exclusive hotel on the site of the camp where civilians died during the Second World War.
“The idea of the film was to show how money erases everything, how it can erase the memory of victims, suffering,” Reljic told and added that the authorities promised from the very beginning of filming that a memorial room would be built within the hotel, but even a year after its opening, it does not exist.
The film “War Souvenirs” by director Georg Zeller is an essay about a journey through BiH two decades after the country was the scene of the penultimate war in Europe, where many real killing sites have become tourist attractions.
“A walk on the fine line between morbid tourism and an empathic culture of memory, along which some enjoy playing war on authentic battlefields, while others struggle to find a way to turn their traumatic experience into a chance of a lifetime,” the film’s description states.
As part of the documentary competition program, the film “Silence of Reason” by Kumjana Novakova will be shown, composed exclusively of testimonies and video materials from the forensic archive about suffering in the camps in Foca.
“The personal experiences of violence and torture suffered by women who went through the rape camps in Foca during the war in BiH transcend the boundaries of time and space and become our collective memories,” the film’s announcement describes, Detektor reports.
E.Dz.
