BIRN BiH Participates in Dealing with the Past Programme at the Sarajevo Film Festival

BIRN BiH Director Mirna Buljigic said that the organization had participated in the programme since its beginning and was one of the four organizations which had several of its stories selected for presentation.

“After the directors watch all five stories on Monday, we shall see whose story will pass the selection process and become material for making a serious world documentary. BIRN BiH represents the organization and participates in this year’s programme with a story about a boy from Srebrenica whose mother abandoned him,” Buljugic said.

The coordinator of the Dealing with the Past Programme, Ishak Jaliman, explained that the programme consisted of two parts. The first presents various films that deal with facing the past, among other things, while the second part is called “True Stories Market” at which five organizations will present their stories.

“Those stories may be interesting to filmmakers. We are trying to connect the organizations researching such stories and filmmakers, producers. In essence, they can become a topic of further investigation and work. Film is the only media that can reach to wider audience and can make some sort of a change, particularly now, 25 years after the happenings in the Balkans,” Jaliman told the Balkans Investigative Reporting Network in Bosnia and Herzegovina, BIRN BiH.

Director and producer Robert Tomic Zuber said that the Dealing with the Past Programme returns for the third year and the Programme’s advancement is obvious.

“In the beginning we had the ‘True Story Market’ in the form of presentation. To us it was the beginning and crowning achievement. Now we have come to the phase where we have a four-day get together, works, watching other films addressing the same theme field, discussions about the project itself, the presentation that will happen on Monday. I think this is a segmented and complex programme which has a lot to offer to its participants during these five days,” Tomic Zuber said.

Tomic recalled the first year of the Programme and BIRN BiH story about Ramiz Nukic from Bratunac who walked tens of kilometres through the woods every day in order to collect bones and, in that way, found more than 200 bodies of Srebrenica residents killed in July 1995.

Speaking about that story, he said it was one of the most impressive and horrible stories one could see and that, with the help from Al Jazeera Balkans, it was shared internationally.

Tue Steen Müller, a movie consultant and critic, said it was his pleasure to take part in the Dealing with the Past Programme, because he thought it was important to have good stories presented by organizations about which a film would be made.

“I think the idea of bringing together organizations and filmmakers is excellent. The organizations have conducted researches, they have got statistical data and everything, which may not be filmic, but good filmmakers, with the help from people from those organizations, can turn them into something that can be presented in the region and beyond,” Müller pointed out.

Producer and editor from Belgrade, Natasa Damjanovic, considers the Dealing with the Past Programme important, because it communicates about these topics at a totally different level in comparison to activist work or political engagement.

“Many people in this region will say it is a thing of the past and we should not go back to that. I think this is important because the stories are often much bigger than the events themselves, and, just like we go back to stories from World War Two all the time, we should go back to these stories as well. And, I consider it particularly important to go back to them from a historical distance,” Damjanovic said.

BIRN BiH has been a Festival partner in the Dealing with the Past Programme since the start of the Programme itself.

This year’s Sarajevo Film Festival takes place from August 10 to 17.