Bosnian Filmmakers Are Struggling But TV Production Is Thriving: ‘Sector Is Much Better and More Optimistic’
variety.comTara Karajica At times Bosnia and Herzegovina has looked like it was stuck in a bit of a no-man’s land when it comes to film production, lacking the financial fire-power to press forward, but its TV series business is booming.
The Southeast European country boasts two Oscar nominations – Danis Tanović’s “No Man’s Land,” which nabbed a statuette in 2002, and Jasmila Žbanić’s “Quo Vadis, Aida?,” which was nominated in 2021 – and its filmmakers have enjoyed success on the festival circuit, but it still hasn’t upped its meagre level of production, especially in terms of fiction features, with only one or two majority Bosnian films produced a year.
The problem lies in the “messy and unregulated model of audiovisual support in general,” according to producer-director Jasmin Duraković, whose film “The Glory of Unhappiness” screens in the BH Film sidebar at Sarajevo Film Festival, which presents the recent crop of films with investment from Bosnia and Herzegovina. “I read somewhere that Bosnia and Herzegovina is the European country that invests the least in film production.
But this is less of a problem than the fact that Bosnia and Herzegovina does not have its own film center,” director Srđan Vuletić, whose new feature project “Gym” is in the works-in-progress section of Cinelink, the festival’s industry program. “Filmmakers are forced to look elsewhere for funding.
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