16th Pravo Ljudski Film Festival reveals full festival line-up

The festival will present 49 films divided into seven programme sections through five thematic units. Festival main programme sections are dedicated to feminisms, ecologies and societal and cultural movements that exhibit and challenge patriarchal and colonial precepts and open up fresh and interdependent perspectives on power, its knowledge, scientific understanding and ‘truths’.

We would like to invite you to search for the becoming of the film, its possibility for growing a subjectivity – as a nomadic device – as a form of new thinking. New thinking able to generate new spaces of knowledge and inquiry, not only visualizing the “real” but un-layering the oppressive. As to impose is not the solution, but to compose – to compose methodological practices that can build possibilities for a relational, common-enough world, states Kumjana Novakova, festival director and curator.

In the first thematic programme titled Feminist Acts of Play and Imagination, feminisms open spaces to act, play, imagine and intimately question and repair. From A Revolt Without Images by Pilar Monsell (world premiere at DocLisboa 2020) to Our Quiet Place by Elitza Gueorguieva (world premiere at Visions du Réel 2021) who will join us in Sarajevo, this programme encapsulates the voices of women who share their struggles and strengths, within the particular language and symbolical space they are captured.

Creative Ecologies for a World Common-Enough programme section bonds films that create and share the particularities of (non)imaginary territories where subjectivity, intimate memory, as well as dream and speculation communicate social and environmental information across centuries. The selection of eight films related to the current and future environmental Crisis grows from historical, mythological and current stories, as Holgut, by Liesbeth De Ceulaer (CPH:DOX 2021 NEXT: WAVE – Honorable Mention), who will join us in Sarajevo, but also capture acts of preservation of communities we are losing – old practices and rituals, as Mateo Sobode Chiqueno captures songs, oral history and local cultural rituals with a cassette recorder of his own Ayoreo natives in Nothing but the Sun by Arami Ullón. We are particularly excited to share Life in Common by the past programmer and long-term collaborator Diogo Pereira whose work takes us to Barruncho, a neighbourhood to be dismantled.

The third thematic programme Our Past Revolutions, Our Future Struggles will showcase films where revolutions are rethought, questioned and thus other possibilities are imagined. Cinematic accounts of civic movements and uprisings will talk to us through 8 films including two splendid film essays, inspired by Jean Luc Godard’s La Chinoise, films Just a Movement by Vincent Meessen and The Inheritence by Ephraim Asili will be screened next to some of the most significant poetic and critical representations of society and working-class like Returning to Reims (Fragments) by our dear friend and collaborator Jean-Gabriel Périot (world premiere at Cannes 2021), Bicentenario by Pablo Alvarez Mesa (world premiere at Berlinale 2021), or Let’s Say Revolution, the shamanic work of Klotz and Perceval whose full oeuvre is a subject of retrospective as we unveil the festival at the Pompidou Center.

Full programme selection can be found in our catalogue at the following link.

The 16th edition of the Pravo Ljudski Film Festival has been generously supported by the National Endowment for Democracy (Washington), and many other partners, while the Special Programme More than Anything Else I Wanted to Stay Awhile is made possible with the support of the Embassy of Brazil in Bosnia and Herzegovina.