The 25th Sarajevo Film Festival opened this Friday August 16 with the screening of the world premiere of Bosnian director Ines Tanović’s The Son.
It is one of the films competing for the Festival’s Golden Heart. This year the jury of the Competition Program for Feature film is presided by Swedish director Ruben Ostlund (Force Majeure, The Square) and consists of Bero Beyer, Festival Director of International Film Festival Rotterdam, Funa Maduka, Director of International Original Films & Acquisitions at Netflix, Serbian actress Jovana Stojiljkovic, and Macedonian director Teona Strugar Mitevska (God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunija).
This is a special year for the festival as it celebrates its silver jubilee. The Sarajevo Film Festival began in 1995, during the siege of the city of Sarajevo between 1992-1996. The festival was created to bring the citizens of the city back together. The festival has now become a prominent window into South East European cinema. The films selected for the feature-length competition this year emanate from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Georgia and Turkey.
Tanović’s The Son is a fitting film to open this 25th anniversary of the festival. The film is a portrait of the city of Sarajevo, as it is today, twenty-five years after the war. The city now has a generation of teenagers and young adults who have not known the war their parents and grandparents experienced. It is this younger generation which The Son focuses on.
The film follows a young man, Arman, who is turning eighteen, and struggles at school and at home. Arman was adopted by Jasna and Senad, who four years later had their own child, Dado. Arman repeatedly questions his place within his family, even though he is constantly reassured by them of their love for him. In a similar way, Arman keeps being in danger of being expelled from school, while excelling academically. Through Arman, an adopted teenager, Tanović depicts a generation who have been taught the horrors of the war, through school and its trips to the museum of War Childhood, but who nonetheless are attracted to guns and violence.
The film never spells everything out for its audience, but rather lets information trickle out. The very beginning of the film, for example, is never explained. We meet Arman as he steps into a taxi to the airport, waving goodbye to his parents and younger brother. Once his plane lands, he arrives in an unknown airport, trying to reach someone who has clearly changed their number. Arman returns home, bursting out with anger and tears. The grandmother admits later on in the film that she did not dare ask Arman what happened, in fear that he might get upset.
The way the film lets its story slowly unfold is also reflective in its cinematic style. Tanović lets her characters reveal themselves. The frame is almost always still and lasts much longer than one would expect. This is especially evident in the few dramatic scenes in the film. In one uncut shot, Arman argues with Jasna, his adoptive mother, accusing her of not loving him as much as Dado, their biological son. As Jasna protests, the frame does not move. There are no counter shots to show Arman’s face, or closer shots of the two characters’ faces. The frame remains unmoved, seemingly unfazed, stoic in its position, rendering this scene ever more emotionally impactful.
The Son is Tanović’s second feature film. She sees it as a continuation of her first feature film Our Everyday Life and her omnibus movie Some other Stories, as each follow the same family living in Bosnia-Herzegovina at different periods after the war. The Son is a Bosnian-Romanian-Slovenian-Montenegrin coproduction. According to ScreenDaily, HBO Europe picked up all broadcast rights, outside of ex-Yugoslavia.
Tanović’s film is a great example of the kind of high-quality films being screened at the festival, and that are being produced in this part of Europe. Sarajevo Film Festival is in fact being held this year under the patronage of UNESCO because it promotes “dialogue and tolerance through the arts” according to the UNESCO Director-General, Audrey Azoulay.
At the opening night, before the screening of Tanović’s film, the festival honored two directors. Polish director Pawel Pawlikowsky and Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu were both given an Honorary Heart of Sarajevo for their extraordinary contribution to the art of film.
