Triumph Over Devastation

Danis Tanovic’s “No Man’s Land” created a stir this year at Cannes, where its playfully caustic sense of humor, moral authority and powerful antiwar message won a standing ovation--and a best screenplay award for Tanovic.

But as important as the Cannes reception was to the film and its Sarajevo-reared writer-director, its opening of the seventh annual Sarajevo Film Festival last Friday night with a standing-room-only outdoor screening was in a way even more significant.

The festival, which will wrap up Saturday night, includes a regional program with short and feature films from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia and Yugoslavia and a tribute to English director Stephen Frears. But the opening night screening, capturing the dark realities of the war and the gallows humor that helped keep people going during the siege, was clearly the festival’s emotional high point.

This was more than a shared triumph for the people of Sarajevo and more than just bittersweet satisfaction in having the world recognize Bosnia’s cultural achievement rather than pitying it for the ravages of the brutal war that devastated this city and the neighboring countryside from 1992 to ’95. This was a celebration of rebirth and regeneration despite everything, building on the festival’s beginnings as a brave act of defiance during the siege.

The nine-day festival features screenings of more than 120 short and feature-length films from 31 countries, including 13 from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, Yugoslavia and other Balkan countries. More than 70,000 visitors will have attended, organizers said, including 35,000 children bused in from around Bosnia for special youth offerings.

This year’s festival also includes screenings of “High Fidelity,” “My Beautiful Laundrette” and other Frears films. “It’s fantastic, isn’t it?” said Frears. “This reminds me of what it must have been like watching films in Italy after the Second World War.

“In America or Europe, films are sort of delivered to you. Here you feel a hunger. There is a sense of passion in the air. It was like that for me when I was young.””No Man’s Land” drew 4,000 to the festival’s opening night. “For me it was even more important than Cannes,” Tanovic said after the screening, relieved that his movie had lived up to the immense local buildup.

“Cannes is the best film festival in the world; let’s be clear,” he said. “But here in Sarajevo, things started to pump up a long time ago, ever since Cannes, and when people have high expectations, very often it is like a balloon, it just goes down.

“This is a special city. You can be a star in Los Angeles and not be a star in Sarajevo. It’s as simple as that. It’s the spirit of people. [U2 lead singer] Bono loves to come here and drink coffee because no one jumps on him. We love him, but nobody will scream at him on the street. People are kind of cool here.”

Tanovic’s film tells a simple enough story: An unlucky Bosnian soldier, ends up in an abandoned trench in the no-man’s land between the two sides. His buddy has been wounded and wakes up to find he’s on top of a mine that will be triggered if he moves. These two Bosnians are joined by a Serb soldier, and a standoff with the simple drama of a stage play unfolds.

Tanovic spent two years in the Bosnian army filming scenes of war, and that background gives him confidence in his vision. He gets the details right, as no less an authority than Gen. Jovan Divjak, the deputy chief of staff of the Bosnian army during the war, can attest.

“Maybe you will not see it, but I was there, and I know how it looked, and I can tell you that was how it looked,” Divjak said after seeing the film at a screening.

Tanovic uses his effective setup to introduce various laughable characters to tell the story of this war, and though he deals in a bracingly savage brand of satire, he seems to like these people.

That goes even for such awful types as the randy, media-toadying British officer in charge of the largely impotent international troops, and the TV reporter (think CNN) whose conniving charm and honest ambition push the story toward disaster.

The cathartic power of the film for a Sarajevo crowd is hard to overemphasize. When one of the men in the ditch, noticing the arrival of the blue-helmeted international troops, called out, “Look, here come the Smurfs!” the laughter was loud and knowing. Like many in the crowd, Tanovic was left after the war with a sense of having learned far too much about life and its grim possibilities.

“I don’t think I needed this experience,” he said thoughtfully, sipping at his coffee in the lounge of the Sarajevo film school where he studied directing before the war. “It breaks something in you. It changes your way of thinking. It brings a lot of bad stuff, very bad stuff. But it brings good things, too. Like appreciation of this coffee, for example.”

That could be the sentiment many in Sarajevo might express, if given the platform Tanovic has gained for himself, and this--giving Bosnia and Bosnians a voice--is the point of the festival. This is still a city where foreign soldiers are ubiquitous and where even the currency was designed by foreigners and imposed on the locals. But the festival is Bosnian to the core, with an appropriate history.

The first festival opened on Oct. 25, 1995, more than two years into the siege of Sarajevo, with Bosnian Serb artillery positions encircling the historic city on the Miljacka River. Food was scarce, mortar blasts abundant, sniper fire inescapable. Susan Sontag was there, along with a cast of serious film people. Some outsiders saw the festival as a pointless exercise, but to the locals, gathering for screenings of “Pulp Fiction” and other films was a potent experience.

“All the theaters were crowded, even though they were bombing,” remembered Sarajevo filmmaker Aida Begic, who attended that first year as a 19-year-old student and who has a film in the regional competition for Balkan films this year.

“I was hungry for years because of the siege; we all were,” she said. “So every time during one of the movies in the festival, when we saw someone eating, everyone would say, Oooooooooh,’ because they were hungry. I saw how much other people [in other countries] were eating, and I hated them for it.”

Director Martin Srebotnjak of Slovenia seemed painfully shy during a tour of the former front lines high above Sarajevo with Divjak. But his film “Ode to a Poet,” in which he stars, ridicules state-sponsored culture with its portrayal of a tepidly rebellious young intellectual whose thick glasses, troubles with women and endless comic agonizing successfully evoke early Woody Allen.

“I think we have confirmation that these are very talented young men and women [in the Balkans] who can be considered on the same footing as the rest of Europe,” said Magnus Telander, festival producer for the Goteborg Film Festival in Sweden.

Tanovic and others predict that by the 10th annual festival, Sarajevo will establish itself as the most important film showcase in its part of Europe.

That may just be regional pride talking. But the success of “No Man’s Land,” whose distribution rights were purchased by United Artists, has already transformed attitudes about Bosnian film and maybe helped inspired the Tanovics of tomorrow.

“What’s good is I see they all felt like, My God, it’s possible; let’s do something,” Tanovic said.

“Now I feel this kind of atmosphere, and I know my film pushed it a little. Producers suddenly started to be interested in what’s happening in Bosnia. They see that it’s possible to make a film about Bosnia which people want to go to see.

“My God, why would people want to go to see a film about Vietnam but not about Bosnia too? There’s no difference.”