Kova: From the Camps of Jasenovac to the Film Festival That Carries Her Name

From there, together with columns of children from Kozara, she passed through Jasenovac, Jablanac, Košutarica, and Mlaka. In Jasenovac, she was separated from her fourteen-year-old brother Ilija - a boy who, through a strange twist of fate, would later take part in the camp's famous breakout and survive the war, one of the very few who managed to.

What few people realise, reading the program of a new film festival in Gradiška today, is that behind its name stands that very same girl. This child survived the wartime camps and grew up to become Bosnia and Herzegovina's first film and television editor.

From Camp Survivor to Co-Founder of Sarajevo Television

After the war, Koviljka finished secondary school and film school in Zagreb, specialising in editing. Rather than stay in Zagreb, she accepted a job offer from Sarajevo and "Bosna Film," where she built a career that would make her one of the founders of Yugoslav cinema. Together with Pjer Majhrovski and Jan Beran, she was one of the founders of Sarajevo Television - she took part in producing the station's first documentary programme, "Oj Kozaro," broadcast in 1961, set in the very region where she'd survived her hardest days as a child.

Her editing work shaped the films "Kozara," "Vrata ostaju otvorena," "Velika turneja," "Zlatna praćka," "Vrtlog," "Narodni poslanik," "Konjuh planinom," "Sunce tuđeg neba," and "Voajer," working alongside nearly every major name in Yugoslav cinema - Miodrag Petrović Čkalja, Bata Živojinović, Boris Dvornik, Ljubiša Samardžić, Milena Dravić. According to stories still told around Sarajevo, Bata Živojinović used to ask his colleagues to stand when Koviljka walked into the room - a gesture of respect rarely extended to a technical craft that, then as now, tends to stay in the shadow of the actors and directors whose work it shapes.

After taking early retirement in Sarajevo in 1992, she returned to her native Gornji Podgradci near Gradiška, where she happily shared memories from her years on film sets with anyone willing to listen, until her death on July 4, 2023, at the age of 91. Last year, in her honour, director Milan Pilipović made the documentary "Kova" - a testimony that weaves together three stories in one: a child in the camps of the Second World War, a woman who helped shape Yugoslav film, and a return to a homeland she never truly left behind.

A Festival That Carries Her Story Forward

That documentary, it seems, was the final push behind writing her name permanently into the cultural calendar of Republika Srpska. From September 10th to 13th, Gradiška is hosting the first edition of the Kova International Film Festival - an open-air event, with part of its accompanying programme also taking place in Banja Luka.

The festival is built as a mix of competition and showcase programming. The competitive section covers short fiction and documentary films, as well as student work, while the showcase segment brings films like "Svadba," "Volja sinovljeva," and "Cat's Cry" - titles that rarely reach audiences outside festival premieres in quite this way, under the open sky.

The festival's goal, according to its organisers, isn't just to serve as a monument - it's to connect local filmmakers from Republika Srpska with colleagues from across the region, primarily the Western Balkans, and to give young filmmakers a platform that a small place like Gradiška could rarely build on its own.

A Town That Decided to Become a Cultural Hub

"Kova" isn't a lone cultural venture for this town on the Sava. Behind the festival stands largely the same team that has spent five years running the "Ljubica" theatre festival, which gathers the best productions from across Republika Srpska.

"Gradiška really has been growing into a cultural leader in Republika Srpska lately, especially considering we're talking about a smaller town," said Zlatan Vidović, one of the people involved in organizing both festivals, adding that a serious team of people stands behind a venture like "Kova."

For a town on the Sava, close to major transport routes, a film festival is also a concrete boost to tourism - one more reason for visitors to stick around longer than the region's natural beauty and food alone might draw them, and get to know a cultural scene that, in recent years, seems to be building itself up more seriously than the town's size might suggest.

A Name That Remembers More Than a Film

Something is fitting in the fact that the first major film festival in Republika Srpska isn't named after some abstract concept or city, but after a woman whose life began in one of the darkest chapters this region has known, and ended in a career devoted to the craft of shaping other people's stories into something worth watching. Editing is, at its core, an invisible craft - audiences rarely notice a good cut, while a bad one stands out immediately. Maybe that's exactly why it feels fitting that a festival carrying her name is devoted to young filmmakers, whose work someone will one day watch without ever knowing how much effort went into making the story look effortless.

The Kova Film Festival runs from September 10th to 13th in Gradiška, with accompanying programming in Banja Luka.