Elma Tataragić: The ongoing crisis is a return to core values
The Sarajevo Film Festival’s main competition selector talks about the film industry during a pandemic.
There's been a huge gap in the film industry.
Photo: Admir Dervisevic, courtesy of Sarajevo FIlm Festival.
Several other festivals decided to do a similar thing to what we did. One of them is CPH:DOX, an excellent Copenhagen-based festival of hybrid documentaries held in March. However, they didn’t have time to think through what they could do with other events in the festival, so they were limited to an online movie-watching platform. We had that comparative advantage, a certain amount of time to get better prepared.Regrettably, it turned out that none of the big players, like Cannes, Karlovy Vary and some others, did anything at all, so no one really lit the way for us. Be that as it may, we decided to be brave and tried to do something on our own. The comments we are still getting show that we did a good job and that people, at least those from the film industry, gathered around their PCs and home cinemas for a few days. They saw movies, followed our discussions, took part in various workshops. The bottom line is that all events were available on our web-platform.
It’s only starting next year that the real extent of the audiovisual industry crisis is going to become clear, because film production has been scarce lately, especially in the region.
Simply put, there’s been a general six-month hiatus that led to a production hiatus, and it’s a domino effect.
This issue is still present in the film industry; women are simply perceived differently in film.
Đorđe Krajišnik
Đorđe Krajišnik is a literary critic and a journalist at the Oslobođenje daily newspaper and the Dani magazine. In October 2017, he worked as a resident for the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel. His literary critiques and other texts have been published in magazines and on websites across the Yugosphere. His publications have been translated into English, German and Albanian. He reviewed and edited several books. Currently, he is working on his first fiction book that will be published soon, should the Muses be in his favor.
This story was originally written in Serbian.