The Sarajevo Film Festival this year celebrates an important anniversary from before the dawn of the Festival and organizes a programme titled “30 Years Since the First War Cinema Apollo.”
The programme “30 Years Since the First War Cinema Apollo” will feature seven film classics: Joel Schumacher’s “Falling Down”, David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart,” Dennis Hopper’s “Easy Rider”, Neil Jordan’s „We’re No Angels“, Jim Jarmusch’s “Night on Earth”, Paul Verhoeven’s “Basic Instinct” and Ridley Scott’s “Thelma & Louise.”
The screenings will take place at the location where it all started: the Obala Open Stage, in the basement of the Sarajevo Academy of Performing Arts.
The festival is rooted in numerous film screenings and events that were staged by the Obala Art Centar, the organizer of the Sarajevo Film Festival, during the Siege of Sarajevo from 1992 to 1995 at the Cinema Apollo. Despite those challenging times, what was collectively known as the first wartime movie theatre offered a desperately needed break from reality to the residents of Sarajevo, who endured the siege of their city for three-and-a-half years. The cinema, located in the basement of the Sarajevo Academy of Performing Arts, was always packed despite the risks moviegoers had to take to reach it in a city under almost constant sniping and mortar fire.
Instead of cash, which was scarce during the siege, to be admitted to a screening one had to hand over the symbolic fee of one cigarette. Due to the cuts in electricity to the city, the theatre was powered by a generator and films were projected off VHS tapes brought into the besieged city by its friends as a rare link with the outside world, especially with the goings-on of arts and culture. With the strong support of the international film community, various film programmes and retrospectives of the selections of top international festivals, such as those of Edinburgh and Locarno, were staged in Sarajevo without interruption from February 1993 to December 1995, giving rise in 1995 to the Sarajevo Film Festival as we now know it.
„This year, we mark the 30th anniversary of the launch of the Cinema Apollo. To celebrate that historic moment and the festival itself, we will showcase the favourite films that were screened in besieged Sarajevo. The films will be screened in the same basement where everything started thrity years ago to offer a unique glimpse into the past,“ said Jovan Marjanović, the director of the Sarajevo Film Festival.
