Festival In Focus: How Sarajevo’s Industry Strand Continues To Balance Support For Emerging & Established Balkan Talent
deadline.comCineLink Industry Days, the industry strand of the Sarajevo Film Festival, has long been considered the leading hub for Southeast European film professionals to come together and, since it was established in 2003, the program has continued to be a generator of content for its own festival as well as other top tier international film festivals throughout the year. “We have projects in various stages of development, from development to post-production in feature and documentaries and drama series in development,” says Maša Marković, Head of Industry at the Sarajevo Film Festival. “It’s quite a wide spectrum of projects that we offer to international audiences, and we help these projects find the best partners to help them finish their films so that, in years to come, they can hopefully return to Sarajevo for the festival.
We are balancing between that while trying to be the most relevant market for emerging but also established talent from the region to help them get the financing they need to finish their projects.” This year will see Turkish director Semih Kaplanoglu, who won a Golden Bear in Berlinale in 2010 for his drama feature Honey, present a new drama series dubbed Last Days of the Sultan at this year’s CineLink Drama section.
Bulgarian helmer Ralitza Petrova, who won the Golden Leopard at Locarno in 2016 for her film Godless, which developed through the festival’s Works In Progress industry section, will return to this strand with her most recent feature Lust. “CineLink has a very strong curational approach,” says Marković. “We are always talking to the people who are coming in and those involved in theh projects we present and the talks we present.
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