‘Sky Above Zenica’ Director, a Ji.hlava Doc Festival Award Winner, on How a Community Mobilized to Fight for Clean Air

variety.com:

Will Tizard Contributor The small Balkan country of Bosnia and Herzegovina has faced particular energy challenges for years, complicated by corruption and ecological threats.

Bosnian filmmaker Zlatko Pranjic teamed with Danish co-director Nanna Frank Moller for a troubling look at the toxic fallout of a chronic polluter, the ArcelorMittal steel plant near Zenica.

The result, the doc “The Sky Above Zenica,” won Ji.hlava Film Festival’s Testimonies section, focused on films that take on urgent contemporary issues, which this year screened docs that inform and inspire on subjects ranging from pollution to climate change by way of Nixon-era archival discoveries and advance research on insects.

As the filmmakers put it, with the fall of the communist regime in the former Yugoslavia, “predatory capitalism invaded Bosnia and Herzegovina” and “ArcelorMittal, the largest global steel producer, shows the repulsive face of ruthless subordination to profit to the people of the Balkan state.” As their film captures, the factory belches pollution into the sky with fumes containing toxins “at levels hundreds of times higher” than current permissible standards.