SARAJEVO: The Sarajevo Film Festival’s final day played host to “Baggage,” a new film by the Oscar-winning Bosnian director Danis Tanovic, a touching story of people searching for their loved ones who went missing during the country’s war. The film, which will have its theatrical release Saturday, follows a Muslim Bosniac returning home to search for the remains of his parents, killed during the conflict.
A meeting with a childhood friend, an ethnic Serb, in the village he had fled enables him to find the spot where his parents were executed and recover some of their bones, but only after paying for the information.
“Unfortunately, it is a true story,” Tanovic told reporters who watched the film.
“Actually the story is composed of three real stories that I was told. Horrible as they each are, they just united in my mind to arrive at the one that is being told.”
“Searching for the victims,” he stressed, “is one of the key problems in Bosnia today for restoring trust” among its three ethnic communities – Croats, Muslims and Serbs.
“Without achieving that, we simply cannot start a new era, since the pain of people who do not manage to find their relatives is the most horrible aftermath of the war.
“These people cannot and do not want to admit [the loss],” Tanovic continued, “and it is their daily nightmare.”
“No Man’s Land,” Tanovic’s black-comic absurdist feature film debut, won an Oscar for best foreign language film in 2002.
Sixteen years since the end of Bosnia’s 1992-1995 war, which claimed some 100,000 lives, the fate of some 10,000 people is still unknown, according to official figures.
Born as an act of resistance when the Bosnian capital was under siege by Serb forces from 1992 until 1996, the Sarajevo Film Festival has become a cutting-edge event where young European talent is revealed.
Besides the official competition for the “Heart of Sarajevo” award, given for the best movie, 200 films, long and short, have been screened at the July 22-30 festival, which has now grown to be one of the largest in Europe.