Festival In Focus: How Sarajevo’s Industry Strand Balances Its Support For Emerging & Established Balkan Talent

CineLink Industry Days, the industry strand of the Sarajevo Film Festival, has long been considered the leading hub for Southeast European film professionals to come together and, since it was established in 2003, the program has continued to be a generator of content for its own festival as well as other top tier international film festivals throughout the year. 

“We have projects in various stages of development, from development to post-production in feature and documentaries and drama series in development,” says Maša Marković, Head of Industry at the Sarajevo Film Festival. “It’s quite a wide spectrum of projects that we offer to international audiences, and we help these projects find the best partners to help them finish their films so that, in years to come, they can hopefully return to Sarajevo for the festival. We are balancing between that while trying to be the most relevant market for emerging but also established talent from the region to help them get the financing they need to finish their projects.”

This year will see Turkish director Semih Kaplanoglu, who won a Golden Bear in Berlinale in 2010 for his drama feature Honey, present a new drama series dubbed Last Days of the Sultan at this year’s CineLink Drama section. Bulgarian helmer Ralitza Petrova, who won the Golden Leopard at Locarno in 2016 for her film Godless, which developed through the festival’s Works In Progress industry section, will return to this strand with her most recent feature Lust.

“CineLink has a very strong curational approach,” says Marković. “We are always talking to the people who are coming in and those involved in theh projects we present and the talks we present. We are very supportive to the industry.” 

CineLink, which runs from August 17-22, dishes out a raft of cash awards to various winners of each strand within CineLink and some of these are unique awards such as the CineLink Female Voices Award, which is granted to one project in development in CineLink’s co-production or drama strands with an aim to support and promote female voices in the Southeast European film industry. Last year that prize was awarded to Tea Korolija, Maja Todorović and Srdan Šaper’s project Connections.

“We really try to make things accessible that aren’t normally accessible to certain talents,” says Marković. 

The former Yugoslavia market (which now comprises Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia) is, says Marković, “a very consistent market in terms of what people watch and read – it functions, in a sense, as a single market.” 

“We are always striving to see how we can have bigger synergies between established industries that do not have that many connections.” 

This year two big focuses in the industry section, whether looking at co-productions or IPs or sustainability, are responsibility and enthusiasm. “This year, we’re looking at who is responsible for what and at what stages in a project as well as how can we create a safer industry for everyone who is involved in it,” she says. “Enthusiasm has been an essential driving force of this industry and with all of the things that are happening globally we want to look at how this enthusiasm can prevail.” 

She adds: “This is a very vibrant region. It’s very broad, culturally and politically, and it’s much more prone to being affected by outside elements with political instabilities. This instability is also, in a sense, a creative driving force because you have to have much more enthusiasm to finishing something up. We cannot rely on resources such as public financing, which means our producers have to have a lot of ingenuity.”