The acclaimed, Oscar-winning directors were bestowed with Honorary Heart of Sarajevo Awards for their “exceptional contribution” to cinema.
"I’ve seen it [Sarajevo] through different stages, before the war, during the war, after the war, but it always fills me with great emotion to be here,” Pawlikowski said during the ceremony.
“This is a city with a heart that is not simple, but rather complicated and full of paradoxes and contradictions, but it is a heart that is very strong, stronger than ideologies and nationalism,” he added.
The Sarajevo Film Festival began as an act of resistance in 1995 during the city’s siege in the Bosnian Independence War.
The siege of Sarajevo, which is the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina, started in 1992 and lasted for three years. The siege is widely referred to as the bloodiest conflict in post-World War II Europe.
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Source: PAP