Cinema Paradiso Lost

“Shell them till they’re on the edge of madness.”

--Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic ordering the bombing of Sarajevo

*

“The poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine: it is the kind of madness whichis the worst.”

--Poet Sylvia Plath, quoted in a press release from the Sarajevo Film Festival

*

Many things come to mind when this city’s name is mentioned, but a film festival is not one of them.

This was the city that survived the longest siege of modern history, more than 46 months of exhausting, terrifying shelling and sniping from the surrounding Serb-controlled hills that damaged or destroyed 60% of its buildings. Some 10,000 died, 150,000 fled, and those who remained did so without much of what we like to consider the essentials.

Often there was no communication with the outside world, no power but foot power, and the city became ironically known as one big Stairmaster. There was no water for bathing or grooming. There was no heat, and Aco Staka, the dean of Sarajevo film critics and a living encyclopedia of Yugoslav film who had participated in festivals around the world, burned 35 years’ worth of clippings to keep his family warm. And there was so little food during the siege that the average person lost close to 25 pounds.

In this formerly beleaguered location, once called “the world’s biggest concentration camp” by a desperate Bosnian official, the notion of something as frivolous sounding as a film festival, even after the Dayton Accord was signed, seemed unlikely, anomalous, confusing. What was going on here?

While visits to more conventional festivals like Cannes or Sundance concentrate on rooting out what is the new and different, the award winners and trend-setters, Sarajevo promised a chance to get at the core of how the medium works and what it can mean. Like the Hollywood director in Preston Sturges’ classic 1941 “Sullivan’s Travels” who takes to the road in an attempt to connect what he does with a larger reality, a visitor to Sarajevo could look into the relevance of film in a setting considerably removed from the fleshpots of the studio system.

As Sullivan himself discovered, trips like this don’t fit into tidy packages. Film and the desire to see it turned out to be surprisingly central to the Sarajevo experience, not only during this, the third year of the current festival, but also during the worst days of the bombardment. Audiences literally put their lives at risk to go to the movies.

“I was scared to death, running all the way with my cousin,” said one woman about a clandestine expedition to see, of all things, “Basic Instinct.” “It was very dangerous, but we did it.”

But the lesson of Sarajevo is more than the accurate but easy one that film can make the world whole. This is, after all, the Balkans, where nothing is straightforward and everything becomes politicized.

“You Americans are very lucky: You have a short history and a simple history,” said filmmaker Srdjan Karanovic, the only Serbian director to come to the Sarajevo Festival. “Here history is very complicated; there is conflict and remembrance from every period.”

So while the Sarajevo Festival turned out to be a lively event, a miraculous breath of refreshing air experienced against overwhelming odds, film can only do so much in a city whose suffering has led to the wholesale changing of names of streets and buildings to fit new political realities.

In front of the burned-out shell of what was once Sarajevo’s 2-million-item library, deliberately targeted for destruction in an attempt to obliterate Bosnian culture, sits a plaque excoriating the “Serbian Criminals” responsible and ending with a stark peroration: “Do Not Forget. Remember and Warn!”

This year’s Sarajevo Festival, held in early September, was noteworthy for films and filmmakers from Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia, three of Yugoslavia’s former republics, but no films came from Serbia. And the two movies from ex-Yugoslavia that have had the most effect on the world cinema scene--Emir Kusturica’s Palme d’Or winner “Underground” and Srdjan Dragojevic’s festival hit “Pretty Village, Pretty Flame”--have been caught in a vortex of survivor politics and generated anger and hostility.

Too much suffering and chaos have happened here for a tolerant, typically American, let’s-forgive-and-forget attitude to completely take hold, even among normally ecumenical filmmakers. More typical are the thoughts of director Ademir Kenovic, who stayed in Sarajevo during the war and whose “The Perfect Circle,” the first film shot in the city after the cease-fire, premiered at Cannes and opened the festival.

“I don’t want to support in any way the stupid idea that’s what’s needed is ‘Shake hands, you filmmakers from Belgrade, you filmmakers from Zagreb, you filmmakers from Sarajevo,”’ he said bluntly. “Nothing will be made better by that, by establishing again the feeling that everything is OK. It’s not about us shaking hands, it’s about about war criminals going to The Hague.”

Once, when Yugoslavia was a country that didn’t need the word “former” in front of it, Sarajevo was a charming, sophisticated locale that elicited comparisons to Paris and San Francisco, a place where “the air was freer.”

While elsewhere in Yugoslavia’s six republics and two autonomous provinces people paid attention to whether their neighbors were Muslim, Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, Sarajevo was different. Nominally Muslim, by all accounts it was an anomaly, a hummingbird of a city, the kind of truly multicultural metropolis often paid lip service to and rarely achieved. A place with passionate film buffs like Dzeilana Pecanin.

Pecanin, a reporter for Oslobodjenje, the city’s resolute daily newspaper, during the war who now works for Voice of America’s Bosnia Service in Washington, confesses to being “completely hooked on the movies.”

“Other girls were getting married, but I was in love with Robert De Niro, and nobody else was good enough,” she said. “When ‘Raging Bull’ opened, me and a colleague took shifts queuing up for tickets on an incredibly long line so we could see it opening night. Everybody was ready to queue for hours, in the rain or the snow, for a movie.”

Then came the war. A war that made a special target of Sarajevo.

“My belief is that it was the place that most embodied tolerance and multiculturalism and that’s why it had to be destroyed,” said writer-director Phil Alden Robinson (“Field of Dreams” and “Sneakers”). Robinson visited the city four times at the height of the war and will return next year to shoot “Age of Aquarius,” starring Harrison Ford as an international relief worker who has a relationship with a Sarajevo woman.

Robinson became so taken with Sarajevo, he said, that “I dream about being back there, and they’re the happiest dreams. It’s a city that intoxicates you for the right and, to be honest, possibly the wrong reasons: for what it is, for what it represents, for being the moral crisis of our time.”

To visit Sarajevo nearly two years after the peace accord was signed in Dayton, Ohio, is to experience a city balanced on the push-pull of then and now.

Remarkably recovered from the destruction but not yet free from memories of the past and a sense that the future is not secure, it is simultaneously exhilarating and depressing.

So while almost all of Sarajevo’s downtown has been rebuilt, pockets of the city are bombed out and desolate. Signs for Calvin Klein and a U2 concert compete for space with announcements about de-mining. The much-shelled Holiday Inn, press headquarters during the war, looks completely new, but the high-rise that housed Oslobodjenje remains a gaunt, ruined scarecrow. Still, Sarajevo remains what Mirsad Purivatra, head of the Obala Art Center and the film festival’s director, calls “this crazy but charismatic town.”

Critic Staka says Sarajevo’s initial importance in film was as an exotic Eastern locale for European directors, “cheaper than going to Baghdad,” but the medium was always important in Yugoslavia because it was important to Marshal Josip Broz Tito, the country’s ruler for more than 35 years.

Though Yugoslav directors like Dusan Makavejev (“WR: Mysteries of the Organism”) became international favorites, being a filmmaker in a socialist country was not easy. After Sarajevo director Bato Cengic turned out films in the early 1970s like “The Role of My Family in the World Revolution” (featuring a cake in the shape of Stalin’s head) that impishly poked fun at the system, he wasn’t allowed to direct for 10 years. Cengic eventually turned his BMW, one of the city’s first, into a taxi to make a living.

“I was a proscribed director,” he said with pride. “I was the example for all Yugoslavia.”

Then, in April 1992, came the war, and the shelling, and everything changed. Some directors, like Emir Kusturica, left the city. Others, like Ademir Kenovic, stayed to bear witness. He founded a group called Saga to document what was happening around him, “the absolutely different, horrible, outrageous, sometimes exquisite” things he saw.

Because movie theaters were obvious targets for shells and snipers and because electricity to run projectors couldn’t be counted on, the only films seen during the war years were either on video or broadcast on television, both of which required loud, noisy portable generators to provide reliable power.

With bootleg cassette copies supplied by visiting journalists or international aid workers, Sarajevo TV stations would broadcast the same film dozens of times.

Haris Pasovic, a successful theater director who mounted his own one-time-only film festival in 1993, recalled: “It was not unusual to begin watching, have the electricity go off after 15 minutes, and to continue in three months to watch again the same film. With ‘A Stranger Among Us,’ I needed three or four times over a year to complete the film,” he said of the 1992 U.S. release starring Melanie Griffith as an undercover policewoman in Brooklyn’s Hasidic community.

“Sometimes you’d know a day in advance when it was the turn for your block to get electricity,” said film buff Dzeilana Pecanin. “I’d go to the little video store by my house and, you can imagine, everything was outdated. I didn’t mind. I’d take anything, especially if it was from before the war started. Watching it would completely take you back. You could completely escape from the horrors of reality for two hours.”

Any kind of semi-organized public showings, however, took longer to get started, in part, Pasovic said, because “everyone felt ‘this will stop next month.’ ”

And in the beginning of the war especially, Pecanin said, “the shelling and sniping was so intense there was no way to go out; people hardly had the strength and courage to find food and water. All other, shall we say ‘nice,’ activities completely died out.”

Still, she said, “many, many people, including myself, dreamed for nights and nights, we wished to see just once more another good movie. It was really hard; many people missed it as much as bread.”

Said director Bato Cengic, who tried not to skip any of this year’s festival screenings: “If I’m seeing five movies a day now, you can understand what a thirst I had during the war for movies. If I’d meet some friends and they’d seen a movie, I’d beg them to tell me every detail of what it was like.”

After the war’s first six months, said Purivatra, the festival’s director, “everyone was getting more and more crazy, and going out was the only way to survive. It was like being in jail but worse, because even in jail there are new faces with cruel stories that could be interesting to hear. In Sarajevo, no one was coming in, and you heard the same stories from neighbors so often it was very possible you were going to one day kill your neighbor. Everyone tried to make some kind of trip out of reality, and everyone wanted to be part of a group.”

To answer these needs Purivatra and his wife, Izeta Gradevic, who had founded Obala as a theater group in 1984, began in late 1992 to sporadically hold word-of-mouth screenings of donated tapes in a dark and claustrophobic basement room accessible only through a bombed-out hole in a surrounding wall. (The hole has only been partially repaired, an unobtrusive memorial to those days.)

“It was a war cinema, 100 seats and a video-beam projector, but in spite of the war, in spite of the shelling, it was packed every night we had a showing,” Purivatra said. “The audience reception of films was completely different here. Sharon Stone naked in ‘Basic Instinct,’ no big comment. But there was a dinner scene in the film that got two minutes of applause.”

Also different, and a taste that in some cases has not changed, was the reaction to violence on screen.

“After my war experience, I really can’t get excited, not at all, by films like ‘Die Hard’ or ‘The Rock,’ ” said critic Staka’s son Vladimir, an Oslobodjenje reporter during the war who is now living in Canada. “Those films are dead for me. People don’t kill or get killed that way. It’s not that pretty, not that iconographic.”

To Americans, who create the world’s most popular films but look on the medium as a weekend diversion, Sarajevo’s intense, almost heart-rending passion for film has to be unexpected, almost disconcerting. Some of it is simply a tribute to film as, in Purivatra’s words, “the most alive medium in the world today.” But when you come to probe film’s meaning in a city under siege, you hear different notions, some expected, like the need to escape, and some that tend to go unspoken and unreflected upon elsewhere.

Mentioned frequently was fear of cultural isolation. “Hunger is not the worst thing that can happen to a person,” said director Cengic. “As for death, I was ignoring it. If grenades went off, I didn’t turn around. I was superior compared to death. But what made me unhappy and sad was that I didn’t have communication with the civilized world. That was the worst part.”

Going to the movies became an act of defiance, proof, said Aco Staka, that the city and its residents were unapologetically alive. Seeing films also helped provide what was most denied Sarajevo’s citizens, something that’s usually taken for granted--the ability to have a normal life.

“You don’t have to have everything fine to want to see movies,” theater director Pasovic said. “You see them because you want to connect . . . to check whether you still belong to the same reality as the rest of the world. The favorite question of journalists during my festival was ‘Why a film festival during the war?’ My answer was ‘Why the war during a film festival?’ It was the siege that was unusual, not the festival. It was like we didn’t have a life before, like our natural state of mind and body was war.”

Pasovic’s festival, held for 10 days in October 1993, in the teeth of the siege and the shelling, symbolizes the furious and foolhardy daring of those determined to watch films. Vladimir Staka remembers it as “crazy, something like a ‘Mad Max’ situation--people were shot and died on the way to the festival.”

It was also an event that completely embarrassed the United Nations, in charge of all flights into Sarajevo’s airport, which refused, possibly on orders from the British government, to fly in stars Vanessa Redgrave, Jeremy Irons and Daniel Day-Lewis.

“So we had our scandal,” Pasovic said ironically, “just like every big film festival.”

Getting the films themselves proved just as difficult, and the festival probably never would have happened if not for Mexican director Dana Rotbart, now the wife and then the companion of “Perfect Circle” director Ademir Kenovic.

“Since I had a Mexican passport and could get in and out of the siege, Haris asked if I could help him,” she said. “I couldn’t telephone from Sarajevo, because we had access to a satellite phone for only five minutes every 15 days. So I sent faxes to everyone I’d met in a year of traveling with my film. Then I took a plane to Paris and for a week or 10 days called every possible person I knew or didn’t know. It was totally nonprofessional; there were no contracts. I just was getting tapes, tapes, tapes.”

Rotbart ended up with 170 cassettes, enough to fill seven large well-packed boxes weighing about 150 pounds. But the regulations on the U.N. military flight she had to take back allowed only 22 pounds of baggage per person.

“The soldier at the airport told me the only way I was going to get those tapes on the plane was if I carried all the boxes myself in one trip. I put ropes on the boxes, it was extremely heavy, but I concentrated very hard and dragged them to the plane, where I made an impolite sign to the U.N. soldier.”

But there was a price to be paid: “I broke my back, literally. I dislocated two discs, and I still can’t pick up anything heavy.” A small smile. “Maybe I should sue the U.N. and really get rich.”

What started with Pasovic’s determination “to see some new films” ended up with a staff of 80. “We arranged with a tobacco factory to give us cigarettes, and a bakery donated extra flour and cooking oil, and everyone was paid with that,” Pasovic said. Tickets were given away, more to control crowds than anything else, and when they appeared for sale on the black market, Pasovic knew the event would be a success. There was criticism about logistics, and even the director acknowledges that wartime conditions meant the festival was “a bit chaotic, not always very well-organized,” with schedules so jumbled it was often impossible to know what was playing when.

Still, Dzeilana Pecanin remembers crowds in front of theaters on opening day, “so excited and happy, just mesmerized by the chance to go into a real movie theater, that nobody thought, ‘I am standing right now in a street where any minute the Serbs can throw a shell and that’s it.’ ”

Which is, in fact, what happened the second day.

“The shelling was so intense and so strong it was too much,” Pecanin said. “Absolutely I’m sure the Serbs knew how unhappy it made us. They just wanted to destroy any sign of humanity, any chance of us feeling like decent civilized human beings. I had a ticket to see Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Dracula,’ and how strongly I can remember the feeling of pain in my chest. It was almost physical. I don’t think I ever hated them so much.”

Seeing films is not so difficult now. This year’s festival, the successor to Pasovic’s, is a key factor in Sarajevo’s renewed spirit. With an attendance of 45,000, almost double 1996’s total, it’s so important to local morale that the Bosnian government just issued a stamp in its honor. It shows the event’s main site for showing films, a year-old 2,500-seat open-air theater, artfully shoehorned between buildings on an old school playground and complete with one of the biggest outdoor screens in Europe.

With financial backing from the city, UNICEF, the Soros Foundation and private sponsors like fashion designer Agnes B, Renault and SwissAir, Purivatra and his programming director, Philippe Bober, put together a slate of 65 films from 27 countries.

While many of these pictures, veterans of the festival circuit like “Guantanamera” from Cuba and “A Taste of Cherries” from Iran, were shown in the just-completed 200-seat indoor theater (also financed by international contributions), the spirit of the festival is most visible in the invariably sold-out outdoor screenings. The slate this time included the first three features shot in Sarajevo since the cease-fire was signed: Kenovic’s “The Perfect Circle” and Michael Winterbottom’s “Welcome to Sarajevo,” both treated with deserved respect, and the unconvincing Spanish “Comanche Territory,” which was not.

Most of the open-air screenings were of big-ticket blockbusters like “The Lost World: Jurassic Park,” “The English Patient,” “Batman & Robin” and “Con Air” (whose John Malkovich was the only major star to attend in person). These were a considerable treat in a city without a viable film distribution system whose remaining functioning theaters were showing out-of-date films like “Nobody’s Fool” and “The Juror.” The energy of people excited to be at the movies marked these packed screenings, and the cheering was loud when Haris Silajdzic, Bosnia’s former prime minister, announced on opening night: “This is a very great occasion for Sarajevo. Those that wanted to kill the spirit of Sarajevo did not succeed.”

There are several reasons why the festival remains essential for the city’s residents. Because they felt abandoned and disowned by the West during the war, says Vladimir Staka, “the main drive that people have is to feel that they are part of the scene,” to reconnect with the culture of the larger world. The way the city’s desire not to be forgotten coincides with the West’s guilt at having forgotten for as long as it did is the dynamic that makes the festival possible.

Allied to this ambition to regain cosmopolitan status, the festival’s presence speaks to deeper needs that most Sarajevans do not necessarily talk about. Nothing infuriates residents more than the perception that, to paraphrase “Chinatown,” “It’s the Balkans, Jake”--that this is a place apart, a locale so riven by ancient hatreds as to be beyond saving. To host a film festival, that preeminent symbol of the cross-pollination of modern culture, is a way of removing the stigmata of the bloody Balkans, a way of reminding the world that this city fought a war because it believed it had earned a place in that artistic cosmos.

In truth, the most powerful feeling generated by being in Sarajevo and attending the festival is the chilling one that if the apocalypse could visit a sophisticated city like this, it could come anywhere. Almost as an aside, a Belgian director at the festival noted that film crews from the two ethnic halves of his country, the Flemish and the French, are never mixed, and he caused an uproar when he did so.

Said Phil Alden Robinson: “A Sarajevan asked me to imagine that the Ku Klux Klan completely controlled our government and media for two years and sent out nothing but racist propaganda. Couldn’t we have a race war here after that?”

So if you choose to weep for the Balkans, it shouldn’t be because they are unique but because they are not.

Given how much Sarajevo has gone through to get to where it is, it would be unfair to leave on a pessimistic note. Fortunately, a major part of this year’s festival was a three-times-daily series of children’s matinees of films like “The Lion King,” “A Little Princess” and “Pocahontas,” which started when director Purivatra realized that the four-year siege meant a generation of children hadn’t had the opportunity to see movies on a big screen.

Held in conjunction with local schools, which bused the students to the thousand-seat Bosnian Cultural Center, these matinees were indescribably joyous and uplifting, a merry maelstrom of wall-to-wall children whose enthusiasm for the medium and for simply being alive went straight to the heart.

To see these small survivors, children who learned to sleep through shelling but were terrified when reconnected telephones started to ring after the war, literally bounce up and down in the purity of their anticipation and glee turned out to be as much of a privilege as this city provides. To witness the power of the unadulterated enjoyment film can provide, to experience the resilience of children, is to believe that Sarajevo’s permanent renewal is possible after all.

*

* Monday: the cataclysmic career of Emir Kusturica.