Ph: Nicolas Genin · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0
Honorary Heart of Sarajevo No. 11 2005
Sarajevo Honorary Heart — Marco Müller (2005)
The Italian festival director who ran Locarno, then Venice — honoured in Sarajevo for building the region's cinema, not for his fame.
- Recipient
- Marco Müller
- Awarded
- 2005 · 11th edition
- Role
- Film festival director — Locarno, Venice, Rome
- From
- Italian
- For
- For his contribution to the Sarajevo Film Festival and to the cinema of the region.
Marco Müller received the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo in 2005, the award’s first year, at the 11th Sarajevo Film Festival. He is the Italian festival director who ran Locarno (1992–2000) and then Venice (2004–2011), and who took over the Rome Film Festival in 2012. By the time Sarajevo honoured him, he was the most influential Italian festival hand of his generation.
The award was given in its early years to the people who built the festival and the region’s cinema, and Müller belongs to that first list. He was known above all as a specialist in Asian and world cinema — he is credited with bringing a generation of Chinese and Asian filmmakers to the attention of Western festivals, and he carried that global eye into his programming everywhere he worked.
His name opens the roll of honour. It is a useful first entry to read, because it tells you what the award was for in 2005: not a lifetime achievement for a star, but a thank-you to the infrastructure of cinema.