It’s time for another edition of the Pravo Ljudski Film Festival!

The 17th Pravo Ljudski Film Festival (PLJ17) will be held this year from September 17th to 22nd in Sarajevo. Aside from the shift in dates, this year’s edition brings a host of changes compared to previous years.

This year’s edition of Pravo Ljudski is a filmic experience that corresponds to the world we as a society have become accustomed to in recent years. Life in lockdown, between closed borders as well as the economic crisis, wars, misogyny, and the looming presence of the patriarchy has led us to reduce our needs to a minimum, live far from each other and communicate through screens, isolated by fears, masks, wires and walls. Therefore, this year’s festival edition is reduced to fewer programs and films that reach for the very essence and the critical issues of the present moment.

The Festival will be speaking on the edition’s sensibilities, films, guests and discussions in the coming days.

This year’s visual identity of PLJ17 is once again the work of Amir Berbić, PLJ’s frequent collaborator for the past 11 years. “The visual of PLJ17 is fully typographic, and the composition of characters implies mass – groups of people, lines, caravans stretching into the distance… The dark colour scheme is cut with an element of optimism in the form of the lighter shades that spell out PRAVO LJUDSKI, as well as the cutting yellow strip that is both a border/delineation and a guiding light or hope,” said Berbić.

SURVIVABILITY AS A POLITICAL SITE is the first and probably most challenging program of this edition, in which we propose (or accept) that political hope can be reached only through seeking and finding ruptures and cracks (in the system). One of the readings of this year’s visual and its burst of colour could be an open door or a beam of light, but a third reading could be a rupture or a crack. Another program, HOW DO WE IMAGINE POLITICAL WORK? consists of film works that emphasise polyphony in the political. The emphasis here is on creating new and unexpected combinations, as these are practices that neoliberalism has yet to commodify, as it does not, at present, even recognise them. From there, this year’s visual reads as asymmetrical at first – but that gradually reveals something new, even and layered, says the Festival team.

The Festival will be held in Cinema Meeting Point, while a part of the accompanying activities will take place in the Sarajevo Film Center and the BiH Historical Museum.