Documentary Collectives, Wartime Publics, and the Creation of a Sarajevo Film

• In Event: Rethinking Yugoslav Culture I: Documentary Practices in Yugoslav Film: Screening the Past, Present, and Future

Abstract

This paper will focus on a series of short wartime documentaries filmed and, notably, screened to audiences during the 1992-95 Siege of Sarajevo. Those who contributed films to this rich documentary archive include filmmakers like Jasmila Žbanić, who would go on to make some of the most lauded feature films from Bosnia, and members of the SaGA (Sarajevo Group of Authors) filmmaking collective – some of whom were established filmmakers in feature and documentary modes before the war, and some who got their start in wartime documentary film. Because of the highly intertwined and collaborative work of filmmaking under siege, the proliferation of short documentaries with overlapping subjects, their collective screening to wartime audiences in war cinemas and in the first Sarajevo Film Festival (1993), and their close relationship with other artistic work being produced simultaneously (literature and the fine arts) lead to a sense that these documentary projects participated in a larger Sarajevo film that was constantly being edited, added to, and shaped by mediated cultural memory practices. This paper takes up with the film history of a number of innovative documentary projects, investigating how cooperation and thematic overlap led to the palpable creation of a film corpus that served alternatively as a witness to wartime realities, as an anti-war manifesto, and as assertion of cultural resistance that would endure long beyond the end of the war.

Author

• Antje Postema, UC Berkeley