Sarajevo Film Festival and WARM Launch a New Film Festival in Sarajevo: WITNESS Festival

WITNESS Festival explores the relationship between film and the real world, focusing on films rooted in real events, people and social processes, primarily documentaries, but also fiction, archival, animated and hybrid works.

A new film festival, WITNESS Festival, will take place in Sarajevo from 24 to 28 November, jointly launched by Obala Art Centar – Sarajevo Film Festival and the WARM Foundation.

WITNESS Festival is dedicated to the relationship between film and the real world, focusing on films rooted in real events, people and social processes. Its programme will primarily feature documentaries, alongside fiction, archival, animated and hybrid works.

From conflicts and political change to human rights, migration, identity and collective memory, WITNESS Festival explores how film documents, interprets and challenges our understanding of reality. Alongside films depicting real events, the Festival will bring those who witnessed them into conversations with audiences following the screenings, reflecting the meaning of its name: WITNESS.

The first edition of WITNESS Festival will take place at four venues across Sarajevo: Meeting Point Cinema, which will serve as the Festival’s main venue; Grbavica Neighbourhood Cinema; Cineplexx Sarajevo; and the Festival Atelier on Zelenih beretki Street, a new space operated by the Sarajevo Film Festival. In addition to film screenings and conversations with witnesses, the programme will include accompanying exhibitions.

WITNESS Festival builds on the distinct but closely connected histories of its two founding organisations. The Sarajevo Film Festival was established by Obala Art Centar Sarajevo in 1995, during the siege of Sarajevo, with the aim of helping rebuild civil society. Today, it is an internationally recognised platform for filmmaking, education, collaboration and promotion. The WARM Foundation (War, Art, Reporting, Memory) is an international organisation dedicated to reporting on, documenting and exploring conflicts and their aftermath through art, journalism and historical research, with a particular commitment to bearing witness to history, preserving memory and bringing overlooked voices and perspectives into public view. Through film screenings and conversations, WITNESS Festival will explore the power of images, the ethics of storytelling and the relationship between personal experience and historical memory.

At the heart of WITNESS Festival is the connection between Sarajevo, a city profoundly shaped by history and itself the subject of some of its most extensively documented images, and a belief in the power of film to question, remember and connect.

An encounter with the real world, on screen and beyond: WITNESS Festival, 24–28 November in Sarajevo.