For its 30th edition last year, the Sarajevo Film Festival unveiled a bold revamp, shifting the nucleus of its activities from its traditional home in the heart of the city’s old town to its modern quarters, a move that festival topper Jovan Marjanović described as “setting the course” for the next 30 years of the celebrated Balkan event.
One year later, Marjanović insists that the work is only just beginning, as the organizers both incorporate and expand on the raft of changes introduced last year. On the eve of this year’s event, Marjanović tells Variety that his team is in the process of “fine-tun[ing] the festival to where we really want it to be.”
Last year saw the bulk of festival activities taking place around downtown Sarajevo’s Hotel Holiday and the adjacent Cineplexx Cinemas, an eight-screen multiplex built in 2021. The freshly built Festival Garden was introduced as an event hub, while industry activity relocated from the old town’s historic Hotel Europe to the sleekly modern Swissotel.
This year’s CineLink industry program will again set up shop in the Swissotel’s conference center, with the Festival Garden, according to Marjanović, operating as a “fully integrated venue” alongside it. The garden has also been redesigned to function as more of a “festival village,” he says, and will be utilized for talks and one-on-one meetings, while also offering social spaces and a bar for informal meetups.
Several new screening venues have been added to the program for the 31st edition, underscoring Marjanović’s conviction that the festival should be “moving towards the audiences,” adding: “We want to try and see how we can serve our audience, wherever it may be.” Meanwhile, the iconic UNIQA Open Air Cinema Stari Grad has gotten an upgrade, with a larger screen, an improved sound system and additional seating that doubles its capacity. The cinema will play host to the new Open Air Premiere program, which will showcase films from the former Yugoslav region.
The festival opens Aug. 15 with the world premiere of “The Pavilion,” by homegrown talent Dino Mustafić, a veteran theater and documentary film director and former artistic director of drama at the National Theatre Sarajevo. A black comedy written by Viktor Ivančić, “The Pavilion” follows a group of elderly residents in a retirement home who launch an armed rebellion after suffering years of abuse and humiliation by their caretakers. The film marks Mustafić’s return to fiction filmmaking for the first time in more than two decades, since his 2003 Rotterdam premiere “Remake.”
Across the festival’s four competition sections for feature, documentary, short and student film, 50 films will compete for Heart of Sarajevo Awards, including 15 world, six international, 28 regional and two national premieres. World premieres include the competition selections “Otter,” by veteran Bosnian filmmaker Srđan Vuletić, and “Yugo Florida,” the feature film directorial debut of Serbia’s Vladimir Tagić, who co-created and co-directed the Canneseries prizewinner “Operation Sabre.” Also world premiering in the documentary competition is “Bosnian Knight,” by Tarik Hodžić, who directed the 2016 crowd-pleaser “Scream for Me Sarajevo,” about Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson’s performance in the Bosnian capital in the midst of its four-year siege.
“The Pavilion” opens the 31st Sarajevo Film Festival.
Courtesy of Sarajevo Film Festival
Nine films will vie for a Heart of Sarajevo Award in the feature film competition, among them “DJ Ahmet,” from North Macedonia’s Georgi M. Unkovski, which won both the Special Jury Award for Creative Vision and the Audience Award following its premiere in the World Dramatic Competition at Sundance this year; “Wind, Talk to Me,” Serbian director Stefan Đorđević’s elegiac feature debut, which premiered in the Tiger competition at Rotterdam; and “Sorella di Clausura,” by Romania-based Serbian filmmaker Ivana Mladenović, fresh off its world premiere in competition at Locarno, where the director’s previous feature, “Ivana the Terrible,” scooped a Special Jury Prize in 2019.
A stacked lineup of local talent underscores what has been a promising year for filmmakers from the Balkan region, with Croatian director Igor Bezinović also making waves with his docu-drama “Fiume O Morte!,” which won Rotterdam’s Tiger Award in February.
“It’s been a good year with new voices. It feels like there’s a bit of a wave coming out of the former Yugoslavia, which has not been the case for some time,” Marjanović says. “This feels fresh. There’s a new group of authors — young blood, let’s say — that have something to say in a different way than what we’ve seen in cinema in this part of the world.”
The competition jury, which will be led by veteran Ukrainian documentary filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa (“Two Prosecutors”), includes Serbian actor Dragan Mićanović (“Operation Sabre”), Romanian director, writer and actor Emanuel Pârvu (“Three Kilometers to the End of the World”), Bosnian Dutch director and writer Ena Sendijarević (“Sweet Dreams”) and Berlin Film Festival director Tricia Tuttle.
Meanwhile, Oscar-winning Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino (“The Great Beauty”) will be feted with an honorary Heart of Sarajevo Award during the festival’s opening ceremony, while a retrospective of the director’s works will unspool throughout the week. Sorrentino — whose latest film, “La Grazia,” opens this year’s Venice Film Festival — will also give a masterclass to share his thoughts on contemporary cinema, joining a loaded line-up of honorees that includes versatile actor Ray Winstone (“The Gentlemen”), Swedish icon Stellan Skarsgård (“Sentimental Value”) and four-time Academy Award nominee Willem Dafoe, who most recently starred in the Locarno premiere “The Birthday Party.”
Sarajevo Film Festival director Jovan Marjanović
Courtesy of Edvin Kalic
Also being honored is filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky, the Russian-born provocateur whose “DAU” — an elaborate, multidisciplinary, “Truman Show”-esque project using thousands of non-professional actors and comprised of 700 hours of footage — sparked controversy when two installments screened at the Berlin Film Festival in 2020. Khrzhanovsky has faced allegations of harassment and a difficult on-set environment for women, which the director has refuted.
Asked by Variety about the Sarajevo festival’s decision to honor the controversial director, Marjanović says the festival “wanted to look at his work from the artistic perspective,” adding that the decision came after extensive deliberation among the programming team.
“We are aware of how controversial [the decision] can be, and we’re not shying away from this,” Marjanović says. “This is definitely a discussion we’re having. I think it’s something to be discussed, and the festival can be a platform for this discussion — how far things can be pushed to make films.”
It’s a provocative choice that’s likely to add buzz to what’s already shaping up to be a banner year for the Sarajevo Film Festival. After a record-breaking 30th edition — which itself smashed the admissions record set in 2023 — Marjanović says ticket sales are off to an “even better” start on the eve of this year’s event, with online sales “through the roof.”
It’s further proof of why the long-running Balkan fest continues to set the standard for the region, having spent three decades using its time-tested formula to become one of the summer festival season’s most-anticipated events.
“A lot of changes have been implemented over the past two, three years, but I think the core festival experience is a lot of people gathered in the same place watching films together and getting to meet afterwards to talk about the films,” says Marjanović. “That’s pretty simple. How to do that pretty simple thing in a great way is something that we’ve managed thus far, but we want to keep doing.”
The Sarajevo Film Festival runs Aug. 15 – 22.
