The siege of Sarajevo, and artists’ role in it, lives on through Milomir Kovacevic’s photographs. To coincide with BIRN’s exhibition of his pictures, Bosnian writer Semezdin Mehmedinovic sets the scene.
Semezdin Mehmedinovic
In Sarajevo, there was a strong need for normality, for a life in which some form of elementary dignity was preserved. As a result, the cultural project that emerged, the need for artists and writers to describe their reality through creative work, was significantly strengthened already in the first year of the siege. Thanks to the existence of some new institutions, created during the war, the image of our reality in the eyes of people around the world changed.
SaGa film production company made films that were released very quickly abroad, which people had the opportunity to see. I remember, sometime in 1993, when I was working at independent radio station Zid (The Wall), we had a project featuring shows in which people from SaGa described their new wartime work, as well as those from Obala Art Centar, which at the time was a very agile cultural institution.
One morning, film director Srdjan Vuletic appeared, happy because Werner Herzog had seen his short film Palio Sam Noge (“I Burned My Legs”) and was impressed, after which he felt the need to send a gift to the director. So a watch that Herzog had prepared for Vuletic arrived in Sarajevo.
