The international Forum Balkan Visions: Creativity For The Future In
South – East Europe was inagurated yesterday at the presence of Yordanka
Fandakova, the Mayor of Sofia, Georgi Stoev, the deputy minister of
Culture, Francesco Bandarin, UNESCO Assistant Director-General for
Culture, and Stefan Kitanov, the director of Sofia International Film
Festival as part of the 16th edition of the festival. The Forum,
organized with the support of Sofia Municipality, will include three
round tables with themes on cinema, the artistic creativity in the city
and visual art innovations. The event is part of the new global
initiative entitled “Culture: a Bridge to Development”, launched by the
Director-General of UNESCO, Mrs Irina Bokova.

This Forum seeks
to sketch a portrait of the South-East European region through the lens
of creativity, and engage civil society, including artists and
creators, in a dialogue to learn about new developments and challenges
they foresee for the future that can inform the introduction of policies
and strategies to foster sustainable human and economic development.

The
film director Kamen Kalev, the producer Amra Bakšić Čamo, head of
CinéLink, Sarajevo IFF, director and producer Tudor Giurgiu, director of
Cluj TIFF, Romanian director Catalin Mitulescu, Ahmet Boyacıoğlu, head
of Ankara Cinema Association, producer and director of SIFF Stefan
Kitanov participated in the first round table Putting a Country on the
International Film Map: Experiences from South-East Europe. Participants
shared briefly the history of their respective festivals and discussed
their common problem – the public institutions acknowledge the presence
of the festivals as a significant cultural activity, but their financial
support is meager and not enough. SIFF receives up to 85 000 lv. from
the Ministry of culture and NFC per year. The other main problem is
attracting more viewers to watching independent and art titles,
including for local cinema productions. There are multiple reasons for
that, and one of the main is a well developed network of distributors – a
thing to improve.

You can watch the whole discussion on SIFF's website.