Dealing with the past: Sarajevo Film Festival’s new True Stories Market

Sarajevo Film Festival’s business forum, CineLink Industry Days, has launched a new section — the True Stories Market — encouraging cinematic dialogue on the Yugoslav wars.

On Wednesday, the True Stories Market presented footage from the archives of key organisations that documented the Yugoslav wars to film and TV professionals. These organisations included the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights and the Centre for Civic Education.

The presentations were followed by an opportunity for one-on-one meetings between filmmakers and representatives of these organisations to discuss potential film projects.

“The research and material available from these organisations is obviously huge, and the number of stories told in the form of film is to date far too small,” said Jovan Marjanović, the Festival’s head of industry. “We want to help change that and our aim is to create an ‘open source’ where these organisations and film-makers connect, so that the research, archives and expertise can be used by film-makers, who in their turn will take them to the larger audiences that these important stories deserve.”

The True Stories Market forms part of the Festival’s Dealing With The Past project, which looks to increase dialogue and cultivate peace through awareness.

The Festival programme itself also included two films that explore issues relating to the wars. Croatian film-maker Irena Škorić‘s Unwanted Heritage, which premiered in Sarajevo’s documentary competition and takes on the issue of the destruction of communist monuments since Croatia’s independence, and Serbian director Ognjen Glavonić‘s Depth Two, a documentary examining the atrocities of the Milošević regime.

Source: Screen Daily