16/08/2013 - Hungarian auteur and Eurimages’ Executive Director will receive the annual award for exceptional contribution to the affirmation and development of South East European film industry.

The Sarajevo Film Festival announced today that Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr (photo) and the Executive Director of Eurimages Roberto Olla are this year’s recipients of the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo. The award is given for an exceptional contribution to the affirmation and development of South East European film industry.

After The Turin Horse [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Béla Tarr
film profile], which he had announced as the last film he would ever make, in October 2012 Tarr founded the film.factory, a Ph.D-level film course at the Sarajevo School for Science and Technology.

Olla was appointed the Executive Director of Eurimages in 2008. In these five years, in addition to the continuous Eurimages financial support to numerous co-productions from South East Europe, the distribution support scheme for European films in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Macedonia, Russia, Serbia and Turkey was fully reformed and a new program supporting the digitalization of cinemas in these countries was introduced. Eurimages also gives out a €30,000 development award for one of the projects at the SFF’s co-production market CineLink.