Edhem Fočo, co-founder of Al Jazeera Balkans, outlines his plans to offer opportunities to documentary makers in the Balkans and MENA via the AJB Doc festival in Sarajevo.

Edhem Fočo

For those seeking new voices or fresh filmmaking perspectives in the documentary field, Al Jazeera Media Network’s annual international documentary pitching event, Industry Days, is opening up new doors to filmmakers, producers and commissioners.

Organised by Qatar-based Al Jazeera Documentary Channel (AJDC) with the group-wide participation of the Al Jazeera Media Network and its regional satellite network Al Jazeera Balkans (AJB), Industry Days is on a mission to plug a gap in the region, and beyond.

The three-day event takes place within the annual Al Jazeera Balkans Documentary Film Festival (AJB Doc), held in Sarajevo in September and organised by AJB.

Now in its sixth year, the festival has become the region’s largest event of its kind. As well as providing the fledgling Industry Days event with a platform to promote an international pitching forum, and Sarajevo already a historical melting pot for East and West, it is also proving fertile ground for Al Jazeera’s own documentary ambitions.

The Musemić Brothers follows two Bosnian brothers who played for FK Sarajevo

There was a lack of documentary films in the Balkans when AJB launched 12 years ago, says Edhem Fočo, director of AJB Doc and one of AJB’s founders. “As a channel, [we] opened different doors to the local population and have captivated audiences,” he says. “When we arrived, everyone started talking about documentaries.”

With its more human-centred stories, AJB effectively helped to kickstart a local doc sector and is now the single largest commissioner and buyer of documentaries in the region, says Fočo.

Having backed several hundred films since its launch, the channel has also become a platform for undiscovered voices in the Balkans and Middle East and North Africa (MENA). “We tend to support young production houses,” Fočo adds. AJB programme producer Lejla Dedić also notes the increase in appetite among viewers for documentaries in the region and further afield.

Originally a documentary film strand within the bigger Sarajevo Film Festival, the AJB Doc festival launched in 2018. Fočo says the feeling was that documentaries “deserved a dedicated doc film festival.”

A key mission for both events was to give a platform to undiscovered, underrepresented or emerging filmmaking talent and alternative perspectives from around the world, with an overriding focus on human stories featuring the universal values of courage, truth, social justice and tolerance.

Lejla Dedić

AJB Doc films are sourced globally, with several of its winners having gone on to be nominated for Oscars, among other prestigious international awards, including Syrian-German copro Of Fathers & Sons (2019), multi-award-winning Syrian film For Sama (2020) and Indian film Writing with Fire (2022). “It shows our selectors are doing a good job,” says Fočo.

This year’s main award went to the Ukrainian Germany copro When Spring Came to Bucha, an unsentimental film about the clean-up required following the liberation of the Ukrainian town of Bucha following the Russian invasion. A Wildfilms production with Germany’s WDR, the doc was produced and filmed by Marcus Lenz and Mile Tešajev.

Like others broadcasters, Al Jazeera is keen to attract a greater share of younger audiences, which Fočo says the main AJB Doc festival is succeeding in doing. Helping it to engage more with younger people, a dedicated ‘Smartdoc’ section focused on training young filmmakers using only smartphones as cameras was launched, with the help of the Al Jazeera Media Institute. The winning films are also screened at the festival.

There is a symbiotic relationship between AJB Doc, Industry Days and Al Jazeera Media Network as a whole, with AJDC, AJB and the soon-to-launch streamer AJ360 all out in force prospecting for new projects at both events.

AJB Doc maximises the exposure of its selections, with the main competition screenings reserved for TV cuts only, which “help multiply the sales of documentary films,” says Fočo. For its part, AJB also offers to buy all the films selected to screen at the festival, as well as boarding as a coproducer on a number of them. A recent example was The Musemić Brothers (Braća Musemić), a 52-minute film about two Bosnian brothers who became footballing legends for FK Sarajevo. The film, from Agencija VIP HD, also scooped this year’s audience award at the festival.

Pitch award winner The Rabbis’ Intifada

At the Industry Days event, this year’s second edition attracted 80 decision makers – compared with 32 in 2022 – who came from across Europe, North America, the Balkans, Caucasus, MENA, Asia and Australasia, according to Industry Days director and AJDC programme manager Adel Ksiksi. “They’re taking notice,” he said, emphasising the event’s focus on undiscovered voices and new talent.

In fact, a common theme among decision makers was access to new or fresh perspectives at the event. “I didn’t used to look at documentary films from the Balkan region before, but I will from now on,” said first-time attendee Soumaya Bouallegui, executive director of Tunisian organisation Doc House, which supports and promotes local documentaries. Another delegate, Margje de Konig, artistic director at Netherlands-based Movies That Matter, noted: “Stories from the Balkans don’t travel so much, but they’re shedding light on issues I’d never thought of.”

The event’s 22 shortlisted projects, whittled down from almost 190 submissions from around the world, are also a measure of Al Jazeera’s ambition to promote undiscovered voices and new perspectives. Common threads running through the pitches included families, migration, refugees, disruption and the trauma of war.

A worthy winner of the event’s main pitch award was The Rabbis’ Intifada. Pitched by US filmmaker Heather Tenzer, the project received US$25,000 in coproduction cash from AJDC.
 The 86- or 52-minute film examines how Tenzer’s own views about Palestine changed after she visited Palestine and she sought to share the views of New York rabbis opposed to the Israeli state’s ‘apartheid’ separation of Palestinians from her own orthodox Jewish community.

Al Jazeera Documentary Channel MD Ahmed Mahfouz with pitch prize winner Heather Tenzer

The other main pitch prize, worth US$8,000 in copro funding from AJB, was awarded to The Srebrenica Tape, a German-Bosnian film by Chiara Sambuchi, which looks at the enduring trauma still felt across the region 30 years on from the Balkan war. Currently in preproduction, the film focuses on the genocide of ethnic Bosniaks by Serbian forces in the UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica in 1995, through the testimony of a father who videotaped events before his death. The tape was smuggled out to his young daughter, who sets out to uncover her family’s history as well as seek answers.

In keeping with its regional presence, the event also focuses on local talent, awarding cash prizes to productions in its Balkan Stars category. This year’s award, worth US$10,000 in copro funding from AJDC, went to a project from North Macedonia called
I Don’t Want To, by first-time filmmaker Hanis Bagashov. Set in North Macedonia, the film follows the fallout in an ethnic Turkish family when the daughter marries a Roma man who lives next door and cuts ties with her parents.

Keen to keep memories of the consequences of the region’s recent troubled past alive, the other Balkan Stars award, amounting to US$5,000 in copro funding, went to Another Film About the War, Father & Home (working title) by Damir Markovina. The doc offers an intimate portrait of the filmmaker’s own father, Roko Markovina, and his views about the break-up of Yugoslavia, as one of six parliamentarians who voted against the Dayton peace agreement covering Bosnia and Herzegovina nearly 30 years ago.