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| Ray Winstone at his master class Photo: Courtesy of Sarajevo Film Festival - Obala Art Centar |
The 31st edition of Sarajevo Film Festival drew to a close yesterday after the award winners were announced on Friday night. Wind, Talk to Me, directed by Stefan Đorđević won the Heart of Sarajevo award for best fiction feature, while Ivette Löcker’s Our Time Will Come was named best documentary.
Đorđević’s feature, which had its premiere earlier in the year in Rotterdam, follows a man who reunites with his family to celebrate his grandmother’s birthday for the first time since his mother’s death.
Löcker’s documentary follows Siaka, from Gambia, and his Austrian wife Victoria who returned to their adopted “homeland” of Austria to build a stable existence and start a family.
Other films among the prizes were Sorella Di Clausura, which saw Ivana Mladenović named Best Director and Fantasy, directed by Kukla, which saw the ensemble cast of Sarah al Saleh, Alina Juhart, Mia Skrbinac, Mina Milovanović share the Best Actress award. Best Actor went to Andrija Kuzmanović for Yugo Florida, directed by Vladimir Tagić.
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| Stefan Dordevic with his award Photo: Courtesy of Sarajevo Film Festival |
It brought the festival’s star-studded edition to a close. Earlier in the week, Swedish star Stellan Skarsgård was among those picking up a Heart of Sarajevo award for his contribution to film. He said: “This is more than I hoped for. Sixteen years ago I was here last time and I can see it on my son who was only a baby at that time, I can see how time has passed. Getting these kinds of awards is kind of like a farewell and a golden watch from you, from the company, saying that you’ve done well, you’re finished, goodbye. But I see it as a new start.”
Also receiving a Heart of Sarajevo was Paolo Sorrentino, whose La Grazia, will open Venice next week. At a master class in his honour, he told the audience: “My films are about emotions, not zombies or other disasters. They portray people, their struggles, their inner worlds. How do you bring that to the screen? Cinema is great for that, because you have a whole set of tricks at your disposal: music, actors, light, the camera… You can, like a magician, create an illusion. But a magician isn’t doing anything truly magical; he’s just using tricks. Filmmakers are the same.
“The challenge is that you can’t learn those tricks from a book, you have to know them, you have to feel them.”
Also taking part in a master class was British star Ray Winstone. He praised the director of Scum, Alan Clarke, for helping to educate him in the art of acting, although he said his wife had given him the best advice when he was fretting about not being able to pull off the role of a punk rocker in Lou Adler’s Ladies And Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains.
He recalled: “My wife said, ‘No, you know, it's quite right, you're not a singer, you're not a pop star, you're an actor’. And that’s probably the best advice I've ever read but I've got it from my wife, not from a director.”
In a wide-ranging chat about his career with Variety’s Alissa Simon, he also spoke about rejection, highlighting an experience he had while playing the villain, Dreykov in Cate Shortland’s 2021 film Black Widow.
He said: “This is rejection for you… I worked with this amazing director, Cate, and we worked out what my character was going to be. I grew this fucking great long beard because he was a paedophile. This guy rounded up all these young girls and they became black widows. We used to get applauded on set by the crew, it’s probably the best thing I’d done for a long time.
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| Willem Dafoe with his Heart of Sarajevo award Photo: Courtesy of Sarajevo Film Festival |
“Then I came home and I get a phone call. ‘Ray, it’s the director, we’ve got to do some reshoots.’ I said, ‘Well, how many scenes?’ She said, ‘All of them’. I went, ‘I think you need to recast it then but I couldn’t get out of it. I was contracted to do it so I had to do it. I go back and they do my hair nice and put me in a suit and I couldn’t do it. I’d done it already. I’d just done this part of walked through it and it felt really like you've been raped, you know what I mean?
“I thought, ‘I’m not doing it now. I’ve done it. That’s how it’s going to be.’ That’s rejection. There’s nothing worse than doing something, leaving it on the floor, and then being told it’s not right.”
Also taking part in master classes were Dau filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovskiy and Michel Franco, whose Dreams played at the festival.
Willem Dafoe also received a Heart of Sarajevo award and took part in a master class hosted by Neil Young. The star, whose The Birthday Party, is currently touring festivals. He said: “I'm always looking for moments where you can be transformed. It frees you and teaches you how to live. If you do it honestly and bare, then the audience experiences the same in a certain way - I think that's the real power of the film.”
Recalling the controversy that blew up around Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation Of Christ, he said: “They complained about the idea of the movie. They hadn’t seen it and then it morphed into a strange thing about Jews in Hollywood and became an antisemitic thing. It snowballed. The perception is that it was the Catholic Church, and it wasn’t the Catholic Church. It was the fundamental right in America that started it. I was shocked because in an age of super violent movies and porn, this is a movie that was trying to address the nature of faith. It was a drag because it was a movie that I was very invested in, in my mind. So it really did keep it from being widely distributed.”
Speaking about why he would prefer to stick to acting rather than step behind the camera, he said: “I love when I have someone who will tell me what they see. For me, part of the excitement is precisely in realizing someone's vision, because through that you always learn something and it challenges your perception and your state. I think the best things come from that ignorance," explained Dafoe.”
As the festival drew to a close, the audience also chose their favourite. The prize went to Georgi M Unkovski’s North Macedonian coming-of-age tale DJ Ahmet.
