Sarajevo Mayor Benjamina Karić explained why she did not attend the opening ceremony of the Sarajevo Film Festival yesterday evening.
She reminded of the great importance of this festival and that the coming days will be days of quality films and good entertainment. She expects Sarajevo to be, as she stressed, the best host. However, she pointed out that she did not attend tonight’s ceremony because of the murder of three people in Gradačac.
“As the mayor of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, I have the obligation to think of people from the whole country, and today we are all particularly shaken and saddened by the monstrous murders in Gradačac. Therefore, tonight I will not be part of the opening ceremony of the SFF. Because of the sadness I feel in heart, I can’t be happy,” she pointed out.
According to Karić, her desire is to draw attention to the increasingly common femicide and violence against women with this move tonight as the mayor of Sarajevo.
“Sarajevo mourns with friends from Gradačac, your pain is also our pain. In the end, SFF was created in the darkest days of the siege and a much greater evil did not stop our love for film and art. Film was and remains our form of resistance. SFF will not and we should not stop even because of this present-day evil. On the contrary, with its excellence, let it encourage the creation of new films that will raise the voice and awareness against the violence we are witnessing today and help us in the fight against this evil. Sarajevo is the city of all of us,” said Karić.
