Sahin Sisic, born in Visegrad-Medjedja, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1961. After attending grammar and high school in Sarajevo, Sisic studied film at the Academy for Film and Drama in 1988 in Zagreb, Croatia. He graduated in 1988 and a year later, his first short film, Margina 88, won the gold medal at the Yugoslav Documentary and Short Film Festival in Belgrade and the Golden FIPA (Festival International de Programmes Audiovisuels) Award at Cannes. Since then, Sisic has worked on several projects as director and director of photography, collaborating with TV crews from all over the world on various films throughout the world. In 1995, his thirty-minute documentary film, Planet Sarajevo, received much attention and won several prizes at film festivals worldwide.

turkeyistanbulIn the spring of 1999, while teaching a course on Balkan history at Harvard University, I was invited by Anastasia Karakasidou to introduce a Bulgarian film in the series of Balkan historical films she had organized at Wellesley College. For lack of any other, but also because I thought it would provide a good basis for discussion on both national interpretations of an imperial past as well as lead us to contemporary issues (it was the beginning of the bombing campaign against Yugoslavia with the news and pictures of refugees streaming out of Kosovo), I showed the film Time of Violence.