Today, as part of the Sarajevo Film Festival's Partners Awards Ceremony, the winners of BH Film - Student program have been announced. Jury members Sabrina Begović Ćorić (director), Strajo Krsmanović (film theorist) and Mirza Skenderagić (scriptwriter and film critic) chose the winners and explained their decisions.  

 

Best Film: B4 by Alen Šimić, produced by Academy of Performing Arts in Sarajevo 

It is an unrepeatable film experience in which the director is facing the most tragic moment of his life which he reconstructs and brings back to life in front of the audience saving his own memory on that way. While he’s listening to the story of the man who saved his life and who is describing that of his parents in detail, the director, as the main protagonist, is running away from the camera, but not identification with his own destiny which he bravely excepts in the same way he excepts this film act as his own. Absence of directors final reaction in the film is actually his attitude about memory as “personal”, psychological space which can’t be shared with the others in its full scope, but which should be left through identification with it and move forward even if one part of us always stays in it, in ana apartment number B4. 

Special Jury Prize: ROOTS by Stefan Tomić, produced by Academy of Arts Banja Luka 

ROOTS are a little masterpiece of associative documentary film in which director finds and points to the poetic nature of memory. Merging personal spaces with his own voice; counterpointing past and presence, life and death, director is filming maybe his only honest conversation with a person who is no longer amongst living. He tells him all the things he never did in and in this “conversation” he finds himself, his distant roots and merges them with his own nature. 

Special Jury Mention: THRALL by Igor Đurić, produced by Animation Department of Academy of Arts in Banja Luka 

In especially difficult moments for animated film in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Đurić is creating both simple and creatively poignant animated film in which animation and the story are strongly connected and present idea of a man who is a thrall of his own desires, which are never in shape with reality in the same way as the image in the mirror is never identical to what we expected. 

 

We congratulate all the winners, thank all the participants for their wonderful films and wish lots of luck to all the students with the films we hope to see the following year. 

Everybody interested in films that were in competition this years, but still haven’t seen them, can do that on ondemand.sff.ba