CULTURE: A Look Into Bosnian Women’s Lives

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Clive Freeman

BERLIN, Feb 19 2006 (IPS) - Famous for its surprises, the Berlin International Film Festival sprang yet another at the weekend with the announcement that Sarajevo-born Jasmila Zbanic had scooped its top Golden Bear award for her first feature film ‘Grbavica’ on the legacy of the Balkans war.

While the film earned high praise in Berlin, the award had been expected to go either to Michael Winterbottam’s powerful British-made terrorist documentary drama, ‘The Road to Guantanamo’ or to Hollywood veteran Robert Altman’s western musical masterpiece, ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ starring Meryl Streep and Woody Harrelson.

Instead, the seven-member international jury headed by famous British actress Charlotte Rampling decided this year’s top award should go to ‘Grbavica’. This is bound to give a tremendous fillip to Bosnia’s fledgling movie industry.

Starring Mijana Kjaranovic, Luna Mijovic and Leon Lucev, Zbanic’s film focuses on the trauma of war, and the story of a single mother who tries to protect her 12-year-old daughter by concealing the truth about the war in Sarajevo and the circumstances surrounding her birth.

Thrilled by the decision, the 31-year-old Zbanic, resplendent in a shimmering full-length scarlet gown, thanked the Berlin organisers for their liberal attitude in “inviting a small film from a small country” to the festival.

“It’s as if I’m in a dream, and will soon wake up and find myself back in Sarajevo,” said the excited director. She said she hoped her first feature film would help people have “a better understanding of events in Bosnia.”

Zbanic pointed out that although the war in Bosnia ended 13 years ago, leading war criminals have still not been captured despite “organising the rape of 20,000 women in Bosnia, the killing of 120,000 people, and the expulsion of a million people from their homes.”

By choosing ‘Grbavica’, the Berlin jury was upholding a long-held tradition of promoting talented young movie-makers. Jasmila Zbanic, whose short films, documentaries and art videos have gained her a lot of attention at international festivals around Europe in recent years, claims her life in Sarajevo changed radically in 1992.

“I realised I was living in a war in which sex was used as part of a war strategy to humiliate women and thereby cause destruction of an ethnic group,” she said. “I lived 100 metres from the front line and was most afraid of this kind of fight. Twenty thousand women were systematically raped in Bosnia during the war,” she said.

“Since then, rape and its consequences have become an obsession for me,” notes one of her movie handouts.

A lot of attention was geared in Berlin to films from Iran, two of which featured along with 17 other movies in the main Golden Bear feature competition.

Iranian director Jafar Panahi was clearly delighted when he learned he had been awarded the international jury’s grand prix Silver Bear award for his film ‘Off-Side’ about a girl who disguises herself as a boy in a bid to get into Tehran’s Azadi Stadium to see a preliminary World Cup soccer match. Women are not allowed inside soccer stadiums in Iran.

Asked if he might face difficulties showing the film in Iran, Panahi said, “Up to now there have been no negative signs. My entire interest when I get back is to make this film public and show it to as many people as possible. I would like it to be shown one month before the World Cup begins, in which Iran has qualified.”

When Michael Winterbottam, winner of the Berlin 2003 Golden Bear award for ‘In This World’ was told he had won this year’s Silver Bear best director prize for ‘Road to Guantanamo’, he took to the stage at the Palast Cinema with the three young ‘stars’ of his movie, whose fate it had been to be shipped to the U.S..-run camp in Cuba after their seizure by the American military in Afghanistan three years ago.

The audience gave the trio, who live near Birmingham in Britain, and are of Pakistani origin, a warm welcome.

Asked about the film, which will be released in Britain this spring, Winterbottam said that before Guantanamo no one would have believed the United States would ever keep people locked up without charges.

“What we’ve tried to do is tell the true story of three individuals. Although the film is a mixture of archive and then talking to camera and us recreating what is said, what we basically try to do is tell the story in their words.”

Recreating the trio’s travels had been complex because “their journey went from Britain to Pakistan, Afghanistan to Cuba, then back to Britain, and then again to Pakistan. It was a long journey and quite complicated trying to reduce all that down to 90 minutes of film.”

The German film industry was given a great boost at the Berlin movie jamboree. The Festival’s best actress and best actor awards both went to young German stars. Sandra Hueller, a talented young theatre performer, won her award for her role in director Hans Christian Schmid’s film, ‘Requiem’.

The movie is about a young student in a German south-west province whose strictly orthodox and religious parents fail to recognise she has a psychological illness. A series of exorcisms results in tragic consequences for the student. Hueller gives an outstanding performance as the afflicted young woman.

German actor Moritz Bleibtreu won his award for his role in the film ‘The Elementary Particles’, directed by Oskar Roehler. A third Silver Bear for “artistic contribution” went to Berlin actor Juergen Vogel who not only starred in Matthias Glasner’s film ‘The Free Will’, but also served as its co-writer and co-producer.

Vogel plays the role of a convicted rapist who continues to have great difficulties in his social encounters with women – even after therapy courses and release from his lengthy jail term.

Denmark’s Pernille Fischer Christensen, 36, was the winner of a jury grand prix Silver Bear award for her film ‘A Soap’, which delves into the complicated relationship story of a beauty farm owner and her new “transsexual” neighbour.

Christensen’s film also won a best first feature award. The 34-year-old Buenos Aires film director Rodrigo Moreno won the Alfred Bauer Prize named after the festival’s late founder for his first feature film El Custodio.