The Sarajevo Film Festival is the premier and largest film festival in Southeast Europe, and is one of the largest film festivals in Europe. It was founded in Sarajevo in 1995 during the siege of Sarajevo in the Bosnian War, and brings international and local celebrities to Sarajevo every year. It is held in August and showcases an extensive variety of feature and short films from around the world. The current director of the festival is Jovan Marjanović. History In October 1993, a ten-day Sarajevo International Film Festival was held, directed by Haris Pašović of MESS. The success of this event, combined with the legacy of Mirsad Purivatra's and Izeta Građević's wartime film screenings from 1992, led to the establishment of an annual festival. The first Sarajevo Film Festival was held from 25 October to 5 November 1995. At that time, the siege of Sarajevo was still going on and attendance projections were very low. However, a surprising 15,000 people came to see the films, of which there were 37 from 15 different countries. The festival grew at a remarkable pace, now being the most prominent film festival in Southeast Europe, attracting more than 100,000 people annually on all programs and screening hundreds of films from 60 countries. The Sarajevo Film Festival is hosted at the National Theatre in front of which the Festival Square and the red carpet are located, with screenings at the Open-air theater Metalac, Bosnian Cultural Center, and five other cinemas and projection locations around the city. The festival has been attended by celebrities such as Robert De Niro, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Emile Hirsch, Orlando Bloom, Daniel Craig, Danny Glover, John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman, Oliver Stone, John Cleese, Steve Buscemi, Michael Fassbender, Jeremy Irons, Bono Vox, Nick Cave, Coolio, Stephen Frears, Mickey Rourke, Michael Moore, Gérard Depardieu, Darren Aronofsky, Sophie Okonedo, Gillian Anderson, Kevin Spacey, Eric Cantona, Benicio del Toro, Tim Roth, Mads Mikkelsen, Jesse Eisenberg and many others. By 2001, the European Film Association made the Sarajevo Film Festival one of the eleven festivals that could nominate a film for the award of "Europe's Best Short Film". The 2001 winner of the Sarajevo Film Festival, Danis Tanović's No Man's Land, went on to win an Oscar in the United States. In 2004, the Best Movie Award was named the "Heart of Sarajevo". Beginning with the 13th Sarajevo Film Festival in 2007 and in cooperation