Maša Marković has been the head of industry at the Sarajevo Film Festival since last year, but she has been working with CineLink for almost 16 years. She calls herself “a child of CineLink”, having progressed from a co-ordination position to industry manager to head of industry. Marković also programmes for the gathering, managing the Dealing with the Past section. Cineuropa chatted to her at Sarajevo.

Cineuropa: What is the focus of CineLink usually, and what is its focus this year, specifically?
Maša Marković: Every year, CineLink brings a mixture of projects at various stages, ranging from development to post-production. It showcases projects that are either fiction features, feature-length documentaries or drama series, and this has been the main strength of CineLink this year because its basis is the Co-Production Market, at which we presented more than 45 projects this year. As in previous years, we feel that we like our curated approach, as we don’t have too many projects, and every year, we tend to invite decision makers who can contribute to these projects. This year, we had a ratio of around 20% newcomers to CineLink.

How many partners and guests did you have this year?
We had a lot of partners, but we kept the number of industry guests down: we are most comfortable with 1,000 industry-accredited guests, as it still allows our event to be big enough, but also intimate enough in the sense that you can meet anybody you want to meet.

So do you have a long-term vision and mission to build, nurture and retain talents?
Yes, the festival as such has built this whole “ecosystem” that extends to students. People present their student works in the Student Competition, come to Talents Sarajevo or the CineLink Co-Production Market with their first features, get partners on board in Sarajevo, showcase the films in Work in Progress, and then come back to Sarajevo with their world or regional premieres, if they had their [world] premiere at some other festival. This has been the whole set-up that has been built and nurtured throughout the years, and it’s been very successful so far.

Were there any specific challenges this year, either before or during the festival?
Not before the festival, no. This year, the preparations went very smoothly, but the opening of the festival was marred by a horrible crime that happened in a small town in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and during the festival, a national day of mourning was announced, so all of the activities, or at least most of them, had to be cancelled that day – all of the screenings and so on.

Do you have any plans for the future, in terms of expansion or coming up with a different way of integrating with the festival? Or is it going to remain the same?
In general, the set-up for CineLink will remain the same: we will continue working on our training initiatives. This year, we had the CNC’s Going European Workshop, and our dedication to developing drama series is continuing. We will definitely be working more on our Producers Lab programme in order to expand the network involving the junior producers who come along.