Culture Festival Brightens Sarajevo's Winter

The annual Sarajevo Winter festival on Monday started its three-day run which will see 1,300 people from 40 countries participating in a wide-ranging series of cultural and arts events at museums, galleries and concert halls throughout the city.

"The meetings between artists from different civilsations, which are taking place within this festival under the auspices of UNESCO and the Council of Europe, prove that differences should - like in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina - connect and not divide people," the Serb chairman of Bosnia's tripartite presidency, Mladen Ivanic, said at the official opening of the event over the weekend.

The programme includes a series of documentaries and a day of animated and experimental films, contemporary art from Korea and traditional music from the Turkic world.

Since it first started in 1984, the Sarajevo Winter festival has become an inseparable part of Bosnia's cultural life.

It was even held during the 1992-5 war, when Sarajevo was under the longest siege in recent history, becoming a symbol of creative freedom despite the conflict.