The 4th INTERNATIONAL BOSNIA HERZEGOVINA LOOKS AROUND FESTIVAL 2021 will hold a main competition and a student competition over the course of one week, featuring films that transform developments in Bosnia-Herzegovina and its neighbouring countries into moving and evocative images from a wide variety of artistic perspectives: into scenes and narratives of their shared history and their war traumas, their social contrasts and inequalities.
This gives rise to documents of the inner tension of a society that oscillate between coping with everyday life, an atmosphere of departure, exhaustion and emigration options - and which is also confronted with the plight of refugees seeking protection, for whom the country becomes, in an even more brutal way, a dead end just before their arrival in Europe.
At the same time, such places create unmistastakable clarity. Stubborn talent for improvisation and survival or desperate solidarity against a relapse into ethno-nationalist revanchism make values like peace and human rights appear with an urgency that no longer allows for businesslike relativisations. Where, if not here, would thinking and acting on a European scale be more challenged to rediscover its emancipative and aesthetic radiance?
