The Sarajevo Film Festival will work with the Berlinale to launch the first Sarajevo Talent Campus, a new educational programme dedicated to young filmmakers from South-Eastern Europe.

The inaugural event will run August 20-25 as part of the 13th Sarajevo Film Festival. As with Berlin's Talent Campus, film professionals will give lectures and workshops for emerging young directors, producers and actors.

'The main goal is to create a platform to provide a unique opportunity for young talented authors to learn and improve their knowledge by working with the most prominent representatives of film industry in the region and worldwide. In addition, the Sarajevo Talent Campus will offer its participants access to the global film network,' said Mirsad Purivatra, director of the Sarajevo Film Festival.

As the Festival developed an important industry section through increasingly successful regional co-production market CineLink, the Talent Campus represents another endeavor which will through time connect young filmmakers directly to the industry. 'The well-established model of the Berlinale Talent Campus is simply the ideal way to realise this project,' Purivatra said.

During the past five years, the Berlinale Talent Campus hosted more than 300 experts and 2,500 young film-makers.

Dieter Kosslick, director of the Berlin International Film Festival, said: 'We are extremely happy that the New Talent Campus Abroad initiative has found a new home base in Sarajevo, a festival known as a highly attractive hub for Eastern European film.'

The festivals already had ties between CineLink and Berlin's Co-Production Market and Sarajevo's TeenArena and Berlin's Generations.

'As for long term expectations: we are very much looking forward to eventually welcome the Sarajevo Talent Campus participants also in Berlin - with their future projects to be marketed and films to be screened and celebrated,' Kosslick added.

The first Sarajevo Talent Campus will be open to about 70 young filmmakers and final-year students at Film Academies from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Greece, Croatia, Hungary, Macedonia, Romania, Slovenia, Serbia, Turkey and Kosovo.