The first 25 years of the Sarajevo Film Festival - an exhibition of archival photographs

An exhibition of thousands of archival photographs at the Meeting Point offers a chronological overview of the emergence and growth of the Sarajevo Film Festival (SFF), from its inception until present days.

The exhibition was originally to be presented within the Festival’s 26th edition, in 2020. However, as the 2020 iteration of the Festival has been pushed online by the corona-virus pandemic, the exhibition was presented to public as part of the opening ceremonies of the SFF’s 27th edition in 2021.

Set up throughout the Meeting Point, the exhibition traces the chronology of the Sarajevo Film Festival, spooling out from just about a dozen photographs captured during its first, war-time edition to hundreds of others taken during the 25th edition of the Festival in 2019.

The photographs of the Festival’s first, war-time, edition, in 1995, are in black-and-white and only a handful had been captured and archived. But they document, among other things, the happiness on the faces of hundreds of children gathered for a screening, in the closed space of the BKC cultural venue in Sarajevo, of A Little Princess by Alfonso Cuarón, who was also in attendance as a guest of the Festival. Next set of photographs, taken a year later, document the festival screenings at the Metalac Open Air Cinema and the reconstruction and opening of the Meeting Point Cinema.

Black-and-white photos are seamlessly replaced by others, in colour. The number of photographs from the Festival keeps rising with each new edition, capturing the growth of Festival audiences, expansion of its guest list and addition of new screening venues. In short, its transition from a simple retrospective of films to one of the most important film festivals in Southeast Europe.