While the beautiful, historic city of Sarajevo was under siege, the everyday lives of people were torn apart. Some wondered whether it would ever be possible to heal the scars of such a suffering. Yet the Sarajevan people proved to be stronger and found ways to pull through. Using their artistic expressions, they responded to the violence they were forced to live with.
When twenty-two of his fellow citizens were killed in the early days of the siege of Sarajevo, cellist Vedran Smailovic responded by taking his cello to the spot of the massacre and playing for the following twenty-two days in their honor. It was a gesture that inspired not only the people of Sarajevo, but the entire caring world.
The first Sarajevo Film Festival also took place during the siege. It has grown into the biggest and most important film festival in southeastern Europe. Organizing the festival in those dark days was a statement—reminiscent of the earlier statement of cellist Vedran Smailovic—that it might be possible to murder Sarajevo’s citizens, but not to kill its spirit.
A Hopeful Note in a Time of War
Vedran Smailovic is a cellist. In fact, in 1992, at the age of thirty-six, he was accomplished enough to serve as the principal cellist for the Sarajevo Opera Company. He came from a family of musicians who toured Yugoslavia under the moniker Musica Ad Hominem (“Music for the People”) taking their music to small villages, often putting together special programs for children.
Vedran Smailovic would likely have remained just one of many thousands of talented but anonymous cellists in the world but for the accident of his birthplace—Sarajevo—and his response to the slaughter that occurred in his town beginning in the spring of 1992. The siege of Sarajevo had been under way for about a month; already many had died, and the infrastructure of the city had been severely damaged. Rations were in short supply, and basic commodities, including bread, were hard to come by. At four in the afternoon on 27 May, in Vase Miskina Street in central Sarajevo, a few hundred meters from Smailovic’s home, several shells lobbed from the hills by Serb gunners exploded as the city’s residents waited patiently in a bread line. Twenty-two people were killed and more than a hundred were wounded.
The next day, at four in the afternoon, Vedran Smailovic appeared in Vase Miskina Street, carrying his cello, dressed in the formal evening jacket and white tie he customarily wore when performing for the opera. Despite the carnage of the previous day, there was, once again, a line of people waiting to buy bread. He planted a simple chair in one of the bomb craters and began playing Albinoni’s Adagio , music which he has described as “the saddest music I know.” On each of the following twenty-one days—twenty-two days to honor the memories of the twenty-two Sarajevans who had died—Smailovic returned to the spot of the massacre, even as the shelling continued, to serenade those fellow citizens who braved the snipers and the mortar fire.
When a reporter from CNN asked him whether he was not crazy sitting there playing while the bombardments sustained, Vedran Smailovic replied, “You ask me am I crazy for playing the cello; why do you not ask if they are crazy for shelling Sarajevo?”
It is doubtful whether Vedran Smailovic managed to save a single life, shorten the Bosnian war, or speed the end of the siege of Sarajevo by even one day. Almost certainly, his brave actions made little impression on the Serb gunners who continued their merciless shelling of Sarajevo from the hilltops surrounding the city—if they were aware of his existence at all. He did not see himself as a peacebuilder. Yet his story has been often repeated and his actions have been held up to the world as a symbol of inspiring courage and nonviolent resistance in the face of horrible violence and human suffering.
Smailovic never claimed that he was doing anything extraordinary. In fact, when asked about it by New York Times reporter John Burns, he downplayed his action.“My mother is a Muslim and my father is a Muslim, but I don’t care. I am a Sarajevan, I am a cosmopolitan, I am a pacifist. I am nothing special, I am a musician, I am a part of the town. Like everyone else, I do what I can.”
Yet doing what he could made an enormous impression. Which, in a sense, begs the question: What should we make of ordinary people who, in extraordinary circumstances, do what would otherwise be ordinary things? What is the value of a gesture of defiance, when it is not going to change the outcome, and it certainly is not going to restore to life and to wholeness those who have been killed and maimed? Where does such an individual act of defiance fit within the traditions of conflict resolution and peacemaking? How should we view such a lonely expression of indignation?
Vedran Smailovic’s most immediate impact was on his own neighbors. Sarajevo is a city whose history dates back more than five hundred years, and which had been a symbol of religious and ethnic harmony. It had survived two world wars almost unscathed and served as host to the Winter Olympics in 1984.
However, now it was suffering an indignity that no one who had lived there could have imagined. By refusing to give in to the terror, Smailovic was making a statement, also on behalf of his fellow Sarajevans, that they can kill some of us, but they cannot kill our spirit and they cannot rob us of our dignity or our humanity. This was a very important message, at that early stage, when it was not clear if the city would be able to hold out against the Serbs, or even if it did, whether there would be much of Sarajevo left.
Smailovic made the right gesture at the right moment. The siege continued for more than a thousand days, claiming ten thousand lives and causing enormous physical destruction. Many who could did flee the city, and yet those who remained and survived managed to confront the terror and the fear—to do their jobs; to find ingenious ways to hold their lives and their families together; to publish newspapers and keep radio and television stations on the air throughout the siege; to organize concerts, theater performances, and films; and even to laugh a bit at the absurdity of their existence—returning, as Smailovic said, “to beauty of a life without fear.” Not, of course, because of Vedran Smailovic alone, but because of a state of mind that his action embodied, and which was embraced by his fellow Sarajevans over the subsequent forty-four months.
Still, Smailovic also had a wider impact. In fact, it could be said that those unamplified notes played in Sarajevo’s devastated center truly were heard around the world. In that sense, the effect was of an absurdly quiet and dignified scream: “Look what they are doing to us. We are civilized, peace-loving people. We just want to go about our business. And they are blowing us to bits.”
There is a curious irony in the story of Vedran Smailovic. The notes he played in May and June 1992 quickly faded away. There are no recordings of those twenty-two Adagios . Yet the story of the “Cellist of Sarajevo” has been told and retold. The power of the story has been such that an English composer named David Wilde wrote a piece, dedicated to Smailovic, that has been performed and recorded by the celebrated cellist Yo Yo Ma, who described Smailovic as “a real, present-day hero” who showed that “an individual can make a difference in the world.” The “Cellist of Sarajevo” has also been cited in sermons and works of fiction.
It has touched many thousands—perhaps millions—of people, evoked many emotions, perhaps been the impetus for reflection and an incremental increase in kindness between neighbors—maybe even between adversaries—and just possibly moved some to work for peace and reconciliation who might never have considered it otherwise. In other words, Smailovic’s very personal action has, in ways that he probably never intended, ended up making a global impact.
There can hardly be a more compelling example of how a solitary fighter might embody the power of people’s resistance than those adagios rising from the streets of Sarajevo in the spring of 1992.

Stimulating a Sense of Togetherness
While the war in Bosnia is over, and the Sarajevo Film Festival is now primarily a vehicle for advancing the cinematic arts of the region, it has a special role to play in binding the wounds of wars, advancing regional cooperation and reconciliation, and promoting peace and human rights. The festival’s year-round Traveling Cinema, which takes film to all corners of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and its Children’s Festival, are both viewed as opportunities to promote multiculturalism and reconciliation.
The terror in Sarajevo had already lasted for forty-two months and claimed more than ten thousand lives. A few weeks earlier, a truce had been put in place—not the first time that the two sides had agreed to stop fighting—but truces had been agreed and violated many times in the past. So, when the first Sarajevo Film Festival opened on 25 October 1995, it was more than just another cultural event. Looking back, the organizers recall that that first festival “could have seemed more like a bizarre act of resistance than a real film festival.” Though features were shown on big screens, many of the films came from the VHS collections of the organizers. Still, it was a serious effort, running for twelve days and featuring thirty-seven films from fifteen countries. More than fifteen thousand viewers attended the showings; every night was sold out.

The Role of Artistic Processes in Peacebuilding in Bosnia-Herzegovina

How did artists and conflict resolution practitioners use arts during the war and in the postconflict period in Bosnia-Herzegovina? Research suggests that arts can play an important role at all stages of a conflict, including:

— Arts as a barometer: arts-based processes can serve as warnings of the escalation of tensions in society through examining the content of visual, artistic, or theatrical products (latent conflict)
— Arts for resistance and survival: during heightened conflict, arts-based processes can serve as a means of resisting violence and/or provide relief as a means of temporary escape (during manifest or extreme conflict)
— Arts for peacebuilding and healing: arts-based processes can bring together groups in conflict to work collaboratively via creative processes and/or help people release negative feelings (postconflict)

(These categories emerged from the research in part due to an interview with Munir Podumljak, Partnership for Social Development, Croatia.)
Figure 1 provides a visual representation of the stage of conflict and area of impact of arts-based activities.

Figure 1: Stages of Conflict and Arts



The research focused on both the role of arts-based activities during the war and how various arts-based activities were building peace after the war. During the conflict, the arts had a critical role in keeping the multicultural spirit of Bosnia-Herzegovina alive in the midst of extreme conflict, particularly in Sarajevo. An example is the first Sarajevo International Theater and Film Festival, organized in 1993, that was attended by over twenty thousand people. On a smaller scale, there were countless creative therapy projects to help youth survive the terror of war. Artistic processes provided a basis for people to come together for community building, support, and temporary release from the difficulties of the war.
In the postwar period a number of groups have used music, theater, photography, and other arts-based activities as a basis for facilitating interethnic interaction and reconciliation. Examples include the use of theater to bring youth together in Mostar organized by the local youth theater, and Pontanima, an interethnic, interfaith choir started shortly after the end of the war. The choir has used music to build connections among the core participants and also use music as a witness for peace to the larger society.

Impact
It is obvious that arts and peacebuilding projects have significant potential to foster relationship building and greater understanding between groups in a conflicted society. The participants involved in a particular process may experience change in their attitudes, beliefs, and possibly behavior toward others. If an arts-based process involves a formal performance component, there may also be an impact on the audience witnessing the event.

Note : Written by Craig Zelizer, who completed his doctoral degree on the role of artistic processes in peacebuilding in Bosnia-Herzegovina (2004, Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University). The author conducted fourteen months of field research between 2000 and 2001 in the area and interviewed sixty-four artists, peacebuilders, and scholars. Zelizer is presently senior partner at Alliance for Conflict Transformation ( www.conflicttransformation.org; czelizer@conflicttransformation.org).


The War Years
The terrible carnage that began in Sarajevo in April 1992 and raged throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina for four years was all the more horrific because it took place in a country that had always represented an oasis of tolerance and multiculturalism, where many nationalities and cultures had lived peacefully side by side for centuries.
Sarajevo’s citizens attempted to carry on as best they could under the circumstances. In the midst of the shelling, they held a “Miss Besieged Sarajevo Pageant” (immortalized in a recording featuring Bono and Luciano Pavarotti) and renowned artists, including U2 and singer-activist Joan Baez, performed in the besieged city.
The Obala Arts Center, a cultural organization long active in Sarajevo, organized exhibitions in its art gallery and, in cooperation with the Locarno and Edinburgh Film Festivals, screenings of independent and art films in improvised spaces. The screening rooms were always filled to their maximum capacity by an audience of all ethnic backgrounds, ages, and religions for whom running through sniper fire to see a film was not really a political act of defiance, but the manifestation of a very basic human need to express and reaffirm life.
The more formal launching of the Sarajevo Film Festival in October 1995 was, then, just an extension of what Obala had been doing informally throughout the previous three-plus years of the siege of Sarajevo.
Since the end of the war, the festival, with a total audience in excess of a hundred thousand, has become a major cultural event in Bosnia-Herzegovina and has evolved into the largest film festival in the entire region, showcasing outstanding films of all sorts, but not to the exclusion of cinematic reflection on Sarajevo’s own recent history. During the war, many of Sarajevo’s citizens documented their experiences—sometimes with professional equipment, and sometimes with simple camcorders. The festival has provided opportunities to show many of these testimonials to the courage and endurance of the people of Sarajevo, including, for example, a program of shorts at the 1997 festival such as Seadi Hihad Kresevljakovic’s Do You Remember Sarajevo? (1993–1995), a collection of moments capturing everyday life during the siege, showing the bombings and sniper attacks as well as the more intimate moments of joy among the surviving citizens; Nedzad Begovic’s War Art (1993), which follows the work of craftsmen who took pieces of twisted debris and transformed them into objects of beauty; and Pjer Zalica’s 1995 short Children Like Any Other , which records the way in which kids were traumatized by the war. Features addressing the conflict have also been shown, including The Perfect Circle by Ademir Kenovic (1997), Welcome to Sarajevo (1996) by Michael Winterbottom, and Danis Tanovic’s Oscar-winning black comedy, No Man’s Land .

Bringing Film to the Children
One of the festival’s other major efforts is to bring film to the children of Bosnia-Herzegovina. During the year, the festival’s crew takes the Traveling Cinema to all parts of the country, particularly to areas of both the Republic of Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where war damage to the cultural infrastructure has been most severe. Film showings in improvised theaters are offered at a symbolic charge and are available to the entire population—all nationalities and age groups—but with a focus on children and young people. According to the Children’s Program director Susanne Prahl, “The program has two equally important goals: to enable children of BiH [Bosnia-Herzegovina] to be informed about the best children’s movies produced recently and also to give the children of different ethnic backgrounds an opportunity to meet and thus stimulate the reconciliation in the country.”
By showing films reflecting a wide variety of different cultures, the programmers believe they are promoting tolerance and expanding the horizons of those living in relatively closed communities. Where Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims come together to attend the festival programs, the festival is also promoting the slow process of reintegration and reconciliation. There is also an important educational function; prior to the screening of the main feature film, short films are screened on subjects such as mine-awareness, environmental protection, multiculturalism, and tolerance. Quite apart from any considerations of the war experience, the Traveling Cinema gives kids a chance to move away from the streets and hopefully gives them ideas of other values and possibilities.
Throughout the year, the festival team makes arrangements for children from disadvantaged areas to visit the Children’s Festival, which is an integral part of the Sarajevo Film Festival. In addition to film showings, many of which focus especially on the issues that concern kids, such as first love, drug abuse, growing pains, and tolerance for people of different religions and ethnic groups, the Children’s Festival features guest appearances by actors appearing in some of the films and additional sport and entertainment programs.

Cultural Nourishment
In 2004, to mark the tenth anniversary of the launch of the Sarajevo Film Festival, it established a new Human Rights Award to pay tribute to artists from the region and the world who celebrate differences and teach the value of peace through the lens of the camera. The award is sponsored by the government of Switzerland. One objective is to generate substantial public and media interest in film makers who focus on ideas such as tolerance, multiculturalism, religious diversity, and peace education. Especially against the backdrop of the experiences of Sarajevo, and within the scope of the powerful medium of film, the award has particular significance.
Perhaps the best assessment of the special role the Sarajevo Film Festival has played and continues to play can be gleaned from the words of Caroline Schmidt Hornstein, head of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Bosnia-Herzegovina, who observed,“Culture is nutrition: it nurtures fantasies, innovation, ideas of the possible, and a moral sense for the common good. The Sarajevo Film Festival is feeding it in the best of ways.”



Contact
Sarajevo Film Festival
Zelenih Beretki 12-1
71 000 Sarajevo
Bosnia-Herzegovina
Tel: +387 33 209 411, +387 33 221 516
Fax: +387 33 263 380
Contact person: Emina Ganic, International Relations Director, emina.ganic@sff.ba
E-mail: general, info@sff.ba
Website: www.sff.ba
Selected Bibliography
“Adagio for Cello and Howitzers.” 1992. New York Times , 10 June.
Burns, John F. 1992. “People Under Artillery Fire Manage to Retain Humanity.” New York Times , 8 June.
Burns, John F., and Jon Jones. 1992. “The Dying City of Sarajevo.” New York Times Magazine, 26 July.
Deats, Richard. 2001. “Adagio in Sarajevo.” The Friendship Ambassador 30, no. 1: 5. Online at: www.faf.org
“From Tom Clancy to Michael Moore to Documents of Local Tragedy, Sarajevo Fest Addresses Violence in All Its Forms.” Online at: www.indiewire.com
“Lights Sarajevo’s Cinematic Fire: Ninth Edition Reaches Peak with Post-War Works.” Online at: www.indiewire.com
McCreary, Alf. 1994. “A Message of Peace in the Language of Music.” Christian Science Monitor , 9 March.
Safford, Victoria. n.d. “All That’s Past Is Prologue.” Online at: www.uua.org
‘Sarajevo.’ Online at: www.kinoeye.org
“The Cellist of Sarajevo.” 1995. Tutti Celli (Internet Cello Society’s bimonthly newsletter) (September-October). Online at: www.cwu.edu