"What do I think of Natural Born Killers? Imagine 6,000 shells fired at the city in one day, and one of them falls into a UN compound. That night the BBC reports: 'One shell fell into a UN compound in Sarajevo today.' That's more radical than Natural Born Killers."
-- Srdjan Vuletic, Sarajevo film-maker and film festival program director

The “First Sarajevo Summer Film Festival” took place from October 27 to November 5th with a thick coat of snow all around the (peaceful) city. Obviously, the festival started a bit late, but nobody was complaining: it was the first time that film was actually projected in almost four years of siege. Predictions of Fire was the closing night film, so it was quite an honor. The largest hall of the city -- 1,000 person capacity -- was filled every night. The peak event of the festival was a 12:00 noon screening of the children’s film “Little Princess” (a 20 million dollar Warners production by Mexican director Alfonzo Cuaron). Over a thousand children -- many of whom could barely remember the experience of seeing a huge screen filled with moving images -- were there.

1995 Sarajevo Summer Film Festival
Catalogue Description

Using an inventive combination of reportage, dramatization, archival footage, animation and miniatures, Predictions of Fire is a revealing study of the controversial and internationally-acclaimed Slovene arts collective NSK, as seen through the lens of Slovene 20th century history. Beautifully shot in Ljubljana, Moscow, New York, and Athens, this imaginative and visually arresting documentary spans an increasingly Balkanized Europe in both space and time to offer a compelling portrait of a culture suspended between East and West. Organized "as a state", NSK (or Neue Slowenische Kunst) spent much of the last decade investigating the nexus where art, ideology and religion meet. Their provocative body of work is characterized in part by a revival of taboo nationalist symbols and totalitarian archetypes for purposes of exorcism or catharsis. In their objects, music, theater and artistic actions, NSK (the rock group LAIBACH, painters collective IRWIN, and theater NOORDUNG) both anticipated and, more importantly, revealed the mechanism of the resurgent nationalism that devastated the Balkans. By documenting the NSK collective's "micro-model" of a Utopian state - and by framing them within the traumatic history of Slovenia & Yugoslavia - Predictions of Fire holds a mirror up to Europe and analyzes the way nations are brought into conformity with ideology.