Sarajevo on film 2017 Turkey
Sarajevo March (Saraybosna Yürüyüşü)
A Turkish documentary by a Bosnian-origin director — ten survivors walk the city twenty years after the siege, and the streets tell the story.
- Director
- Ersan Bayraktar
- Year
- 2017
- Runtime
- 84 minutes
- Language
- Bosnian / Turkish
- Country
- Turkey
- Genre
- documentary
Sarajevo March (Saraybosna Yürüyüşü) is the film that approaches the siege twenty years later, and its method is a walk. Ersan Bayraktar, a Turkish director of Bosnian origin, took ten people who lived through the war and followed them through the city’s streets — the pavements, the buildings, the memorials — as each one walks the route their memory has kept. As the camera moves with them, the signs of the siege are visible in the present-day city: the scars, the rebuilt facades, the everyday life that has grown over the war.
The Istanbul Film Festival, where the film played in the 2018 national documentary competition, describes it as “the story of victory, not atrocity” — a film less about the violence than about the people who survived it and kept walking. It premiered at the Sarajevo Film Festival in 2017, and its ten walkers are Sarajevans themselves: a documentation of the city telling its own story, in its own streets.
For a visitor, it is the film that matches the act of walking the city: ten Sarajevans showing you, through their own routes, how the marks of the war sit inside a city that has gone on living. Watch it before a day on foot, and every corner you pass will carry a second layer.
Critical reception
The film premiered at the Sarajevo Film Festival in 2017 and screened in the national documentary competition at the 37th Istanbul Film Festival. Professional critical reviews in English are scarce — it is not indexed by the major aggregators — and its record rests on festival selections and the director’s reported reception at the Sarajevo premiere.
Public reception and legacy
The film screened in the national documentary competition at the 37th Istanbul Film Festival and was distributed on MUBI. Its framing, in the festival’s own words, is “the story of victory, not atrocity” — ten survivors walking the city twenty years after the siege.