FESTIVALS

The Bangladeshi Short Film Forum 1999

A personal journal account on the author’s stay and impressions of the 6th International Short Film Forum held in Dhaka, the capitol of Bangladesh, from February 4-12.

The Short Film Forum Festival is a festival of short fiction, documentary, animated and experimental films at which ca 200 film from 22 countries were shown. In addition to the main program, there were retrospectives of contemporary Bangladeshi films, German and Iranian short films, a program of Indian animation selected by the Bombay Films Division, and a special program that was dedicated to films about Bosnia.

The Festival was opened with a screening of the film Sobe bez pogleda (A Room Without a View) by Rada Šešić who also participated in a seminar titled Women — Film makers. In the View on Bosnia program, there were screenings of documentaries including Petar Krelja’s Na sporednom kolosijeku (On the Secondary Track) and Američki san (The American Dream), dedicated to the problem of refugees, and the films of Bosnian film makers including Vesna Ljubić’s Ecce homo, Vuk Janić’s Psalm, Lidija Zelović’s Kuća, a ne dom (A House, Not a Home), as well as the film The Stars Once Spoke to the People... by Dutch filmmaker Lidi Koopmans.

Rada Šešić