MESS Festival

The International Theater Festival MESS has been held since the 1960s every year in Sarajevo. During the war years 1992-1995, the festival, under the direction of Haris Pašović, was renamed into the International Theater and Film Festival MESS  and became a central piece of the cultural resistance to the siege in Sarajevo. MESS launched numerous initiatives, as the Hiroshima 45 – Sarajevo 93- days together with Radio Zid and the first Sarajevo film festival. It produced different performances in Sarajevo in cooperation with international artists, for example with Susan Sontag (“Waiting for Godot” and Peter Schuman, and was also invited to perform in other European countries (Sarajevo Festival Ensemble.)