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SARAJEVO, September 20 (FENA) - A film from the competition selection "For Sama" by Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts opened this evening at the Sarajevo’s Cinema City the second edition of the Al Jazeera Balkans Documentary Film Festival (AJB DOC).
It is a story of an intimate and epic journey into the female experience of war. A love letter from a young mother to her daughter, the film tells the story of Waad al-Kateab’s life during five years of uprising in Aleppo, Syria, as she falls in love, gets married and gives birth to Sama, all the while cataclysmic conflict rises around her.
Al Jazeera Balkans Director Tarik Đođić said at the opening of the festival that he hoped this second edition of the festival would reach at least the levels of last year’s festival success.
“The festival season in Sarajevo has been expanded, these days we are seeing the change of seasons and this will be both, summer and autumn festival,” he added.
The AJB DOC Festival Director Edhem Fočo said that the visitors and the audience will have a chance to see 23 films, seven of which are domestic productions, and will bring shocking stories that deserved to be told.
“These are films that are sometimes better than feature films because they are real stories and real events, and are often unpredictable. Last year we had a film that was filmed over the period of 20 years, and this year we have films that have been shot over a period of five, six or seven years,” Fočo said, expressing hope that the audience’s response would be as it was last year.
Being that the slogan of the Festival is ‘Change’, Fočo said that everyone needs change, both in society and as individuals. All the films talk about the change and that is why the slogan made perfect sense.
He also noted that this is one of the few festivals attended by almost all of the authors, as many as 21 of them, which gives visitors the opportunity to experience yet another dimension of the film.
The second film of this opening evening to be screened is "Cleaners" by directors Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck, which will open the out of competition selection "Last Minute Cinema" and will bring the story of an unknown industry, a hidden third world shadow industry of digital cleaning, where the Internet rids itself of what it doesn‘t like. Here we meet five “digital scavengers”, among thousands of people outsourced from Silicon Valley, whose job is to delete “inappropriate” content of the net.
In addition to these two films, which will be screened on the first day, 21 more top production documentaries await the audience.
In all the films that will be screened, there is an aspiration for change, which is the slogan of this year's festival, manifested in the individual as well as in society, in technology as much as in the country, but the most important struggle of the individual is the one happening due to the change in their environment.
AJB DOC Film Festival is organized by Al Jazeera Balkans in collaboration with Al Jazeera Media Network and Al Jazeera Media Institute from Doha and is taking place at Cinema City in Sarajevo from September 20 to 24.
(FENA) S. R.
