Petra Seliškar and Hanna Slak in the competition programme

05. August 2013
The 19th Sarajevo Film Festival, which has established itself as the most important international film festival in the region of the former Yugoslavia and where a significant number of the global and especially European filmmakers gathers every year, is going to take place between 16 and 24 August this year.

This time two Slovenian films will be presented in the documentary film competition programme: the full length documentary Mother Europe (the Earth is More Important) by the director Petra Seliškar and the short film Screens by the director Hanna Slak. The films will be screened on 19 August.
Mother Europe is the story of Europe as seen through the eyes of a six year old girl named Terra, born in the Balkans, but raised as a citizen of the world by the father of Cuban - Macedonian descent and mother of Slovenian ancestry. On the journeys with her parents around what used to be Yugoslavia the girl meets a number of people, and through their life stories she learns about countries, politics and history of the continent which is certainly not united.
The new original documentary film by Petra Seliškar, who already surprised us with a personal story depicted in a successful film Grandmothers of the Revolution in 2006, was filmed in Slovenian-Macedonian-Croatian co production. The film premiered in June at the MakeDox festival in Skopje, and after the screening in Sarajevo it will travel to the Dokufest in Prizren. In September it will be shown in the competition programme of the LET'S CEE Film Festival in Vienna, in October at the The Nuremberg International Human Rights Film Festival, and in November at the Free Zone Film Festival in Belgrade.
The short documentary film Screens by Hanna Slak was created during the three year research for the feature film Miner, which received the funds for script development at the last tender of the Slovenian Film Centre. The feature Miner is being created on the basis of the recently released book by Mehmedalija Alić entitled Nobody. It is a dramatisation of the writer's true life story, which has led him from Srebrenica to Huda jama.
The short film shows the annual burials of nearest relatives in Srebrenica, which is still going on after 17 years.
Currently Hanna Slak lives in Berlin. In Slovenia she shot her two live action features: Blind Spot (2002) and Tea (2007).
On 20 August the film Adria Blues by the director Miroslav Mandič will be shown in the programme named Guests of SFF in Sarajevo after a successful premiere at Karlovy Vary and screenings in Pula and Jecheon, South Korea.
The production house Staragara will be present at Cinelink, taking place in the context of the Sarajevo Festival. Their film project entitled Mercedes – Fire Horse by the director Jan Cvitkovič has qualified among the sixteen projects selected at the CineLink and CineLink+ competitions from out of as many as 90 film projects! These are platforms for the development and financing of carefully selected film projects interesting as potential European co productions. The projects of both CineLink selections compete for financial awards in the total value of EUR 50,000 as well as for awards in the form of technical services of partners and sponsors like ARTE, CNC, Eurimages and Synchro Film and Video.
This year the Sarajevo Film Festival will also host the Sarajevo Talent Campus – a programme intended for the education and networking of young filmmakers from the South East Europe – for the seventh year in a row. This year the Slovenian actors will be represented by Domen Valič.