The Euro­pean film fes­ti­val lead­ing the fight for gen­der equality

Ana Urushadze’s debut fea­ture Scary Moth­er won the Heart of Sara­je­vo award last week, neat­ly wrap­ping up the 23^rd edi­tion of the annu­al cin­e­mat­ic event held in the Bosn­ian cap­i­tal. Urushadze was not the only female win­ner of the night, how­ev­er, as Antone­ta Ala­mat Kusi­janović (Into the Blue), Ornela Kapetani (Day­break), Kata­ri­na Mora­no (Ljubl­jana-München 15:27) also received awards across var­i­ous categories.

The rel­a­tive suc­cess of women at this year’s Sara­je­vo Film Fes­ti­val speaks to the fact that its jury mem­bers are care­ful­ly hand­picked, def­i­nite­ly not gen­der-biased and con­sist­ing of at least one woman in each of its many juries (notably Fat­ma Al-Remai­hi, the CEO of the Doha Film Insti­tute and Turk­ish actress Melisa Sözen in the Fea­ture Film Com­pe­ti­tion pro­gram and Ser­bian direc­tor Mil­i­ca Tomović in the Short Film Com­pe­ti­tion pro­gramme, among oth­ers). Grant­ed, more could always be done, but this suc­cess is tes­ta­ment to the festival’s com­mit­ment to the cham­pi­oning of women in the film industry.

Con­scious of the under­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of female direc­tors in major com­pe­ti­tions at var­i­ous major fes­ti­vals, not to men­tion the lack of gen­der equal­i­ty across the film indus­try, in 2015 the fes­ti­val organ­ised a high-lev­el con­fer­ence on the top­ic with­in the frame­work of the Bosn­ian and Herze­govin­ian Chair­man­ship of the Coun­cil of Europe’s Com­mit­tee of Min­is­ters, who have iden­ti­fied gen­der equal­i­ty as one of their pri­or­i­ties. It result­ed in the draft­ing of a Sara­je­vo dec­la­ra­tion on women in Film, which includes pro­posed mea­sures for achiev­ing greater equality.

Today, a new wave of Euro­pean female film­mak­ers are enter­ing the dis­cus­sion. This year’s Sara­je­vo Tal­ents pro­gramme was opened by Aus­tri­an direc­tor Jes­si­ca Haus­ner. The pro­gramme wel­comed for its 11^th edi­tion 46 female par­tic­i­pants hail­ing from 14 coun­tries and work­ing across var­i­ous fields with­in the film indus­try. Many of these were rep­re­sent­ed either entire­ly or most­ly by women, such as pro­duc­tion, screen­writ­ing, edit­ing and film crit­i­cism. In total, women made up 65 per cent of Sara­je­vo Tal­ents in 2017.

More­over, the Sara­je­vo Film Fes­ti­val is com­mit­ted to rais­ing the vis­i­bil­i­ty of women in film and cre­at­ing a diverse blend of voic­es through its fem­i­nist pro­gram­ming. Its chief pro­gram­mer, Elma Tatarag­ić, admits that she con­scious­ly address­es this issue when select­ing films, ​“I want to know if it’s a male or female before I watch the film. I don’t care what the film is about, but I want to know which hand it comes from.” Accord­ing to her, the sit­u­a­tion for women in film in Bosnia has improved con­sid­er­ably since the war, when out of a hun­dred fea­ture films only two were direct­ed by female direc­tors. There were no female pro­duc­ers at the time and women were present in the film indus­try either as actress­es, cos­tume design­ers, make-up artists or on-set sec­re­taries. The per­cep­tion of women, too, was alarm­ing, with female roles gen­er­al­ly fit­ting into two char­ac­ter types: moth­ers and prostitutes.

Today, the pres­ence of women as pro­duc­ers, writ­ers and direc­tors has risen to 25 per cent, while there are 50 per cent female stu­dents at the Sara­je­vo Film Acad­e­my. This change has paved the way for promi­nent Bosn­ian female direc­tors such as Jas­mi­la Žban­ić, Aida Begić and Ines Tanović, whose work has screened in com­pe­ti­tion at the fes­ti­val, as well as that of pro­duc­ers Amra Bakšić Čamo, Neira Hugusić and Sab­ri­na Begov­ić. All of these women are active­ly chal­leng­ing the treat­ment and per­cep­tion of women in film. And Tatarag­ić is not the only one work­ing hard to include women in the festival’s com­pe­ti­tion pro­grammes – this year, the pro­gram­mer of the new­ly estab­lished Stu­dent Film Com­pe­ti­tion pro­gramme, Asja Krs­man­ović, select­ed 10 films made by women, out of a total of 13 entries.

The Sara­je­vo Film Fes­ti­val is a pos­i­tive exam­ple of pro­gram­ming that is not sole­ly based on taste, tim­ing and pol­i­tics. Women are impor­tant there. The fes­ti­val is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning female-dri­ven art. With the Cinelink Indus­try Days and Sara­je­vo Tal­ents com­ple­ment­ing its main pro­grammes, the fes­ti­val con­tin­ues its fight for gen­der equal­i­ty by cel­e­brat­ing women in dif­fer­ent ways and on dif­fer­ent lev­els. It should applaud­ed, sup­port­ed and copied for it.