Reportage: I Survived the SFF!

At the football cage

Dreamtime painting by Frog

Irvin aka "Frog"

The Red Carpet

My Refuge

Almir, Friend and Underground Man

Walking to City Centar

I am safely returned from a week in Sarajevo, my senses of time, distance, and causal relationships all subtly warped.

I survived the Sarajevo Film festival with the help of my friend Almir,
a true underground man who was my guide introducing me to food, music,
personalities, many a .3 L beer, and the best local watering holes which
helped serve as retreats from the crowd and noise of the festival days
and nights, and with the true refuge provided by Irvin and Draza, - who
evicted their 6-year old daughter so I could stay in her room - educated
Bosnians who had returned 4 years ago from 8 years in Australia where,
needing work, they were recruited by a Russian to work for an Iranian,
painting, as "Frog" and "Sara," authentic aboriginal Dreamtime paintings
for sale to tourists and which I had admired on their apartment walls.

I saw 9 or 10 films – Serbia, Croatian/Bosnian, Spanish, Chinese, Greek;
attended 3 or 4 music concerts – Cuban, Serbian gypsy, Croatian rock and
roll; participated on harmonica in 2 all-nighters at the Marquee Rock
Club, where under a huge portrait of Elvis Presley the owner would
ensnare unsuspecting patrons in a web of his virtuoso rock and roll
guitar playing until many drinks later they might notice that the dawn
had long since come and gone. ("John! John!," he would cry, "You must
hear this!!!")

I drank coffee at the Holiday Inn while a sudden storm blew the
courtyards fountains water horizontal; I saw Gillian Anderson's rear end
moving away from me in a golden sheath on the red carpet; spoke with the
director of the festival who had started it 15 years before as a
gracefully defiant gesture during the war; drank vodka with the aging
vice-mayor of Sarajevo who probably held the proper position judging
from his attention to the micro-skirted young woman sitting at my right;
drank beer with a man famous long ago as the best and fastest food
waiter during the Sarajevo Winter Olympics of 1984. I tucked in my
sweaty tee-shirt before I walked the same red carpet under the TV lights
and camera into the National Theater and its uncomfortable seats for the
first regional screening of a Greek film which was so creepy and
unhealthy that I left part-way through. At 3 a.m. on a Sarajevo
backstreet, I par-TAYED with "Bimbo,"a gaunt and spectral, tuba-playing
Professor of Comparative Literature from Sarajevo University who would
only grunt each time I tried out lines from English, French or German
poetry.

I missed a friendly soccer game with Iran – the stadium was half-empty
but they had not printed enough tickets and so could not let us in and
our harrowing taxi ride and exposure to the angry mob of unhappy fans
was for nothing, but then watched the same game from the Manhattan Club,
feeling much safer and happier.

Like a scene from a Fellini movie, I saw a wedding procession of maybe
50 cars stretching over several blocks winding their way slowly through
the rush hour traffic, each car decorated with flowers and driven by
serious men in white shirts and black ties, all pounding on their car
horns as they circled the city again and again.

I saw thousands of the most long-legged, gorgeous women on the planet
(after our own, of course, guys); drank vino with another "Fellini," a
big man who had suffered a black out, fall, and hospital stay from two
ulcers at almost the same time I had and was equally prohibited from
drinking alcohol; learned to upgrade my usual response "dobro" (good) to
"odlicno," (excellent).

Now I am safely back and decompressing, the all-night bus ride being
fine except for the big Turkish young man in the next seat fresh from a
24-hour holiday in Sarajevo who kept dozing off and falling on my
shoulder. The peaches are all gone from the tree (thankfully harvested
by friends), my neighbors are off for a few days to their small house on
the other side of the island, my own house is empty and quiet.

I put on some old gypsy music on a CD that I bought for $4. in Sarajevo,
make some watered down coffee, and watch the temperature rise, thinking
of family and friends back home.