In 1993, during the siege of Sarajevo, film fans started a movie club, laying the foundations for the Sarajevo Film Festival.
“I was young and I wanted to live normally, to be young, to have fun,” she remembers. “And that’s when I heard of the Apollo War Cinema. I knew I had to go.”
The Cinema Apollo was in the basement of the Sarajevo Academy of Performing Arts, a culture center in downtown Sarajevo. In the midst of the siege, the cinema reopened and began screening films in defiance of the “normal abnormal” reality. “My parents begged me not to go, my father literally got down on his knees and begged me, but I didn’t listen, I got on my bike and rode to the Obala, to the Apollo,” says Tataragić. “It was dangerous, I rode past snipers’ nests, but I didn’t care. I was so excited. I put on my best clothes. I still remember wearing my white sneakers. They were new and they pinched. I didn’t care.”
Cash was scarce during the siege, so smokes had become the unofficial currency of the city. “I was teaching English to little kids at the time and their parents would pay me in cigarettes,” says Tataragić. “Half I’d give my father, the other half were for me.” Admission to the Apollo cost one cigarette.
Screenings were packed. Due to the cuts in electricity to the city, the theater used generators to power the projector, and picked its program from VHS tapes donated by friends or smuggled in from the outside world. It was an eclectic selection., the Whitney Houston film,” Tataragić remembers. “Then it would be a week of French New Wave. I didn’t care. I just wanted to see a film.
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