That aforementioned style, of course, can’t be ignored, particularly in the breathtaking cinematography by Erik Messerschmidt (Ferrari), turning the film’s many aerial sequences into dazzling vistas of clouds and mountain ranges. (The Italian Alps stand in for the Colorado Rockies.) The bigger the screen, in this case, definitely the better.

Screenwriter Mark L. Smith (Twisters) adapts the 2012 novel by Peter Heller, and Heller’s story about a world wiped out by a flu pandemic hits different for audiences in the COVID era. Hig (Jacob Elordi) and his devoted dog Jasper live on a mountaintop airfield in Erie, Colorado, with only the grumpy and pragmatic Bangley (Josh Brolin) for company. While Bangley obsesses over the possibility of interlopers, Hig periodically flies his Cessna into the ruins of Denver to pick up supplies — which he shares with an agrarian Mennonite community, led by Aaron (Benedict Wong) — and to visit the home he once shared with his pregnant wife, who didn’t survive the epidemic.

After tragedy strikes, Hig sets out to find other survivors, hoping that the existence of a static-y voice (Allison Janney) on his plane’s radio is proof of an enclave at Grand Junction. On the way there, his Cessna suffers engine trouble, and he lands on a ranch owned by the aggressively territorial Pops (Guy Pearce) and his kind daughter Cima (Margaret Qualley). As Hig befriends the father and daughter, and they help him clear out trees to make a runway, they (and, back in Erie, Bangley) must contend with roving bands of feral marauders, seemingly out to quash any remaining signs of civilization.

For all the plotting questions that arise — the apocalypse has gone on long enough to cover Denver skyscrapers with vines, but not so long that Hig can’t still find Coca-Cola products in the ruins? — a veteran like Scott certainly knows how to spin all of this into a fairly engaging yarn, whether he’s throwing in a sudden, unexpected stampede of forest creatures or casting seasoned performers who can breathe life into underwritten characters.

Both Brolin and Pearce seems to be entering their Lee Marvin phase, although Brolin’s performance suggests the screen icon’s more wryly laconic work while Pearce delivers the Point Blank thousand-yard stare. Janney makes the most of her role, but to say more would be to spoil one of the film’s most surprising turns. As for Elordi and Qualley, they have proven their dramatic mettle elsewhere, but all they’re asked of this time around is to provide their movie-star charisma. Their combined powers make The Dog Stars more gripping than it might otherwise be, but it’s not enough to flesh out such a routine tale.

The film indulges in some gratuitous violence, particularly in a nighttime sequence where a camouflaged Bangley repels a group of invaders; this isn’t a zombie movie, so all of the tattooed creeps being shot, stabbed, and blown up are human beings and not mindless creatures. The relish with which they’re dispatched feels a bit off-putting, particularly given the film’s overarching messages of hope for humanity.

The cast must have attended some kind of pre-production summer camp, because this is a movie where people are constantly repairing items, uprooting stumps, or otherwise performing hands-on tasks. This DIY ethos plugs The Dog Stars into a contemporary prepper zeitgeist, building a world where no authority figures are there to save you or even to help you, and it’s up to you and the people you love to take care of each other. Like so much of what the film has to offer, that’s a message that’s already been expressed elsewhere, with greater depth, but Scott and company at least present it in a handsome package.

Director: Ridley Scott
Screenwriter: Mark L. Smith, based on the novel by Peter Heller
Cast: Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley, Allison Janney, Benedict Wong, Guy Pearce
Executive producers: Lily Brooks-Dalton, Brandon Scott Smith, Peter Heller, Aidan Elliott, Raymond Kirk, Marco Valerio Pugini
Producers: Ridley Scott, Michael Pruss, Mark L. Smith, Cliff Roberts
Director of photography: Erik Messerschmidt
Production design: Chris Seagers
Editing: Claire Simpson, Sam Restivo
Music: Harry Gregson-Williams
Sound design: Danny Sheehan, supervising sound editor
Production companies: 20th Century Studios, Scott Free
In English
118 minutes

OFFICIAL AWARDS 

HONORARY HEART OF SARAJEVO AWARD 

Emily Watson, actress
Diego Luna, actor
Woody Harrelson, actor
Asghar Farhadi, director
Emir Hadžihafizbegovic, actor

Given in recognition of an exceptional contribution to the art of cinema.

COMPETITION PROGRAMME – NARRATIVE FEATURE FILM 

Jury: 
Emily Watson, president (actress, United Kingdom)
Igor Bezinovic (director, Croatia)
Sara Klimoska (actress, North Macedonia)
Matthijs Wouter Knol (CEO and Director of the European Film Academy, Netherlands)
Athina Rachel Tsangari (director, screenwriter and producer, Greece)

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST NARRATIVE FEATURE FILM 
EVERYTIME
Austria, Germany
Director: Sandra Wollner
Producers: Lixi Frank, Viktoria Stolpe, David Bohun
Award in the amount of €16,000.

Jury citation: Moments of cinematic grace float through this mesmerically elastic and transcendental grief-soaked ghost story. Our decision was unanimous.
The Heart of Sarajevo For Best Narrative Feature Film Award goes to EVERYTIME, directed by Sandra Wollner, and produced by Lixi Frank, Viktoria Stolpe, and David Bohun.

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST DIRECTOR 
Ana Urushadze, SUPPORTING ROLE / MEOREKHARISKHOVANI ROLI
Georgia, Estonia, Türkiye
Award in the amount of €10,000 is sponsored by the United Nations in Bosnia and Herzegovina in cooperation with UNESCO.

Jury citation: We were enchanted by her irreverent blending of the banal and the oneiric, and her refreshing curiosity for meaning in life and cinema. We cannot wait to experience her next cinematic dare. The Heart of Sarajevo for Best Director goes unanimously to Ana Urushadze for SUPPORTING ROLE.

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST ACTRESS 
Eva Kostic, 17
North Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia
Award in the amount of €2,500 is sponsored by L’Oreal Paris.

Jury citation: A fearless emergence of a young talent. Raw, visceral and deeply instinctive. She brings an extraordinary emotional truth to the role, announcing the arrival of an actress with a rare and powerful voice.
The Heart of Sarajevo for Best Actress goes to Eva Kostic for „17“.

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST ACTOR 
Adrian Vancica, YOU DON’T BELONG HERE / NU E LOCUL TU AICI
Romania
Award in the amount of €2,500.

Jury citation: For a performance marked by tenacity and understated rigour, in which the actor consistently serves a story directed in long and wide shots, the Heart of Sarajevo for Best Actor goes to Adrian Vancica for YOU DON’T BELONG HERE.

COMPETITION PROGRAMME – DOCUMENTARY FILM 

Jury: 
Kamal Aljafari (director, screenwriter and artist, Palestine)
Sabine Gebetsroither (Co-Festival Director of the CROSSING EUROPE Filmfestival Linz, Austria)
Ollie Huddleston (film editor, United Kingdom)

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE FILM 
TO HOLD A MOUNTAIN / PLANINA
Serbia, France, Montenegro, Slovenia, Croatia
Directors: Biljana Tutorov, Petar Glomazic

AN OSCAR® QUALIFYING FILM
Award in the amount of €4,000 is sponsored by the Government of Switzerland.

Jury citation: With astonishingly epic cinematography this touching portrait of two extraordinary women and a disappearing way of life enchanted us. Tied together by a traumatic past their struggle to save the mountain was an unforgettable journey.
The Award for the Best Feature Length Documentary goes to TO HOLD A MOUNTAIN by Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazic.

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST SHORT DOCUMENTARY FILM 
HOLY DEFIANCE / TIHA MISA
Croatia
Director: Karla Jelic
Award in the amount of €2,000.

Jury citation: This short and extremely powerful film featured a brave act of defiance against resurgent male misogony. We salute the film‘s courageous artist who stood alone against reactionary crowds trying once again to confine society and silence women.
The Award for Best Documentary Short goes to HOLY DEFIANCE by Karla Jelic.

SPECIAL JURY AWARD
THE FERRY FLOWS / PAROM PLYVE
Ukraine, United Kingdom
Director: Zhora Papoian
Award in the amount of €2,500.

Jury citation: Without being didatic, this short film showed the power of images to tell stories. We were given time and space to experience the lives of a music teacher and his pupils who are forced to endure grief and loss as part of their daily lives. This is a film made with tenderness and subtlety, its humanity shone through.
The Special Jury Award goes to THE FERRY FLOWS by Zhora Papoian.

COMPETITION PROGRAMME – NARRATIVE SHORT FILM 

Jury: 
Goran Gajic (director, Serbia)
Natalia Mirzoyan (animation director and artist, Armenia)
David Montenegro (Head of Programming at the Cartagena de Indias International Film Festival, FICCI, Colombia)

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST NARRATIVE SHORT FILM 
NOBODY SAID ANYTHING / NITKO NIŠTA NIJE REKAO
Serbia, France, Slovenia, Croatia
Director: Tamara Todorovic

AN OSCAR® QUALIFYING FILM
Award in the amount of €2,500.

Jury citation: For its ability to construct, within a limited timeframe, compelling and coherent characters, while steadily building an atmosphere of tension toward the third act. The jury celebrates its confident directorial vision and the subtlety of its script.
The award for Best Narrative Short Film goes to NOBODY SAID ANYTHING.

SPECIAL MENTION 
PORKATAL
Türkiye, France, United Kingdom
Director: Sis Gürdal

Jury citation: The Special Mention goes to a film that moved us through its poetic and deeply emotional atmosphere, gradually revealing the inner world and emotional depths of its character through a performance that feels both natural and profoundly moving. The special mention goes to PORKATAL.

COMPETITION PROGRAMME – STUDENT SHORT FILM 

Jury: 
Jara Sofija Ostan (actress, Slovenia)
Vladimir Trivic (director of photography, Bosnia and Herzegovina, United Kingdom)
Adem Tutic (director, Serbia)

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST STUDENT SHORT FILM 
UNWELLNES
Hungary
Director: Réka Pinczés
Award in the amount of €1,000 is sponsored by the Regional Cooperation Council.

Jury citation: The Student Film selection this year has been truly exceptional. We had an extraordinarily difficult task choosing a winner, and every filmmaker in this programme should be enormously proud of their work.
At a breaking point in her life, a woman finds herself experiencing a subtle interaction which suddenly takes her on a journey of re-exploration of herself and understanding of what life can be. The film is anchored by a profound visual language that captures the essence of her transformation, strongly focusing on what lives within, and finally, how a woman finds her way back to herself. The Heart of Sarajevo for Best Student Short Film is awarded to UNWELLNESS.

SPECIAL AWARD FOR PROMOTING GENDER EQUALITY 

Jury: 
Niamh McCormack (actress, Ireland)
Michael Stütz (Head of the Panorama section and Co-Director of Film Programming at Berlinale, Austria)
Andrea Štaka (director, Switzerland, Croatia)

17
North Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia
Director: Kosara Miti?
Award in the amount of €7,500 sponsored by Mastercard.

Jury citation: This masterfully directed film does not shield the viewer from the discomfort of showing the systemic neglect and societal taboo of sexual abuse and female youth trauma. The raw and claustrophobic cinematography centres an incredibly assured and devastating lead performance and also captures a powerful bond of female solidarity. The ultimate critique of a patriarchal toxicity. The Special Award For Promoting Gender Equality goes 17 by Kosara Miti?.

SPECIAL MENTION 

DON’T ASK ME IF I KILLED
Romania, Netherlands, Germany, Ukraine
Director: Helena Maksyom

Jury citation: With extraordinary courage, clarity and cinematic confidence, this film takes us inside an extreme reality. The filmmaker is both a soldier and a director, yet the strength of the film goes far beyond the exceptional circumstances. In precise images and a strong sense of rhythm the filmmaker transforms the everyday experience on the front in the Donetsk into a cinematic experience. A powerful and deeply human film.
The Special Mention goes to DON’T ASK ME IF I KILLED by Helena Maksyom.

SPECIAL YOUTH PERSPECTIVES AWARD 

Jury: 
Vinko Brešan (director, Croatia)
Andrei Dragos Tarta (public policy and advocacy expert, Romania)
Georgi M. Unkovski (director, North Macedonia)

SKATEBOARDING IS NOT FOR GIRLS / SKEJTANJETO NE E ZA DEVOJCHINJA
North Macedonia, Belgium, Slovenia, Croatia
Director: Dina Duma
Award in the amount of €7,500 sponsored by the Council of Europe.

Jury citation: The Youth Perspective Award goes to a film with a touching story of unity, family, and the hope that comes from belonging. It offers an authentic portrayal of youth and of the agency of people within marginalized communities, their freedom to make their own choices in the face of tradition and societal expectations. Defying stereotypes with a warm, intergenerational story, this is a film that stays with you long after watching. The award goes to SKATEBOARDING IS NOT FOR GIRLS. ]]> https://thefilmverdict.com/the-verdict-sarajevo-2026/ Fri, 21 Aug 2026 20:45:37 +0000 https://thefilmverdict.com/?p=47577 Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski led a starry roster of guests at the Sarajevo Film Festival’s 2026 edition, with his latest film Fatherland chosen to open the week-long event at which American star Woody Harrelson, directors Asghar Farhadi and Celine Sciamma, Mexican actor Diego Luna were also in attendance. Both Harrelson and Luna were Honorary Heart of Sarajevo recipients, in recognition of their careers and contributions to cinema.

A luminous black-and-white film that grapples with exile, return and the rehabilitation of cultural figures after Germany’s darkest wartime era, when artists made very different choices to prop up, resist or escape the regime, Fatherland is just the kind of thorny political cinema that Bosnia’s flagship event has never shied away from, embracing its program as a means to navigate its own turbulent past at the heart of Europe, and its long years under siege in the ‘90s. Pawlikowski told the local audience that he feels at home in Sarajevo, a “city that smells of history.”

The jury, comprised of British actress Emily Watson as president, directors Athina Rachel Tsangari and Igor Bezinovic, actress Sara Klimoska and CEO of the European Film Academy Matthijy Wouter Knol, awarded Best Film to Austrian director Sandra Wollner’s Everytime, a mesmeric and unusual meditation on memory and grief, and Best Director to Georgia’s Ana Urushadze for Supporting Role. Eva Kostic was named Best Actress for her role in 17, and Best Actor went to Adrian Vancica for his performance in Florin Serban’s You Don’t Belong Here.

A concern with power and resistance, and navigating the past in the present, echoed through the Narrative Feature competition, which was notably strong this year. It was threaded through with urgent, politically resonant themes such as cycles of violence (Kosara Mitic’s 17 and Blerta Basholli’s Dua), economic pressures (Visar Morina’s Shame and Money and Zvonimir Juric’s Small Things), and self-important men reckoning with a decline in machismo and influence (Urushadze’s Supporting Role, and Florin Serban’s You Don’t Belong Here.)

In the Documentary section, the top prize went to Montenegro-set To Hold a Mountain, a portrait of women in a shepherd family in territory now being used as a NATO training ground, by Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazic. It was awarded by a jury made up of director Kamal Ajafari, Crossing Europe festival director Sabine Gebetsroither, and editor Ollie Huddleston. Salient issues from the region were particularly foregrounded in the selection, from healing ethnic divisions in Damir Markovina’s reflection on family and his hometown of Mostar, We Shall Live Together, to bearing witness to Macedonia’s recent deadly nightclub blaze, in Milcho Manchevski’s Good People.

The Best Narrative Short Film went to Nobody Said Anything, by Tamara Todorovic, and Holy Defiance by Karla Jelic was named the Best Documentary Short Film.

The festival’s specially curated, annual Dealing with the Past section added to a sense that the festival takes its role seriously as a public space for processing history and belonging, with films such as Abdallah Alkhatib’s Chronicles from the Siege, Ivan Ramljak’s Peacemaker and Lana Daher’s Do You Love Me among powerful works negotiating memory and identity.

This year, in addition to receiving an Honorary Heart of Sarajevo, Asghar Farhadi was also honoured with a tribute retrospective of seven selected films from his body of work to date, including his latest film Parallel Tales, and the two dramas which won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, A Separation (2011) and The Salesman (2016). In a masterclass, he emphasised the role of cinema in reminding us of the universality of shared human emotion, in a world in which the media and politicians increasingly want to divide us.

In a conversation with moderator Neil Young that spanned over one and a half hours, the director covered many topics, from the unique challenges of directing children (“every time I work with them, I say it’ll be the last time,” until realising they are the ultimate observers, “watching everything,”), the specificity of curse words in building characters (“I always think about how they will swear,”) and the underrated value of editors (“When they give a prize to an actor, I think they should actually give that prize to his or her editor.”)

Farhadi stressed the importance of staying alert to the details of everyday life as a writer and director, and closely observing reality. “To be a creative person, you need to have eyes and ears like a kid. Even if you’re making a film that’s not realistic, you need life as a source,” he said. He described helping his family in their grocery store in the Isfahan province of Iran as a child, and how it gave him the opportunity to interact with many people, and notice their behaviours, a solid education in life accrued long before he went to theatre school and fell in love with the playwrights Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and August Strindberg.

“We have an emotional bank inside us. But you need to find the password,” he said. As adults, all of our actions and attitudes have roots in our childhood experiences, he believes. Direct engagement with people and reality around us is valued less by today’s directors, he contends, as a means to make works that really resonate. “Our source has changed from real life to cinema itself, and it’s a problem.”

Farhadi is among a small, select group of directors, which also includes Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, to have won the Oscar in the category of Best International Feature Film more than once. But he is very wary of letting it go to his head, and suspicious of the seductive nature of public accolades, which can cause a director to lose touch with the people whose stories they purport to tell. “Success is very dangerous, it creates a distance between you and people,” he said.

It can also hamper a director by limiting their freedom to make mistakes. “We need to be able to take a risk, where we don’t know what the result will be,” he said, adding: “Some filmmakers love filmmaking, but some love to be a filmmaker. It’s two different things.”

It is also essential not to lose faith in the shared humanity of local stories, he said. When he made A Separation, his best-known drama, about a marriage breaking apart a middle-class couple in Tehran, and its reverberations through their extended family, in 2011 it became the first Iranian film to win the Oscar for what was then Best Foreign Language Film. The story was so local he assumed it would not work internationally. But he learned that “if you’re an honest filmmaker, more local is more universal,” he said. “We forget it these days, because the media and some politicians highlight our differences, but hate and love are basic emotions that are the same everywhere. If you make a local film based on humanity, everyone will understand.”

The central character is Patti (Gerti Drassl), a 50-year old woman living in a small village in East Germany. The year is 1990, and the country is undergoing reunification after the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the revolutions in the Eastern Bloc which will lead to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Amidst all this, Patti loses her job and her best friend Jelena (Manuela Biedermann). Collecting discarded objects, she fills her apartment to such an extent it’s no longer habitable, at which point she sets out into a forest, embarking on a journey that will take her through history.

Per the accompanying statement on Locarno’s website, the film is rooted in Donschen’s own experiences, as she grew up during reunification and effectively spent her formative years rediscovering her own country. The title encapsulates that feeling very efficiently, as it alludes to a system where the split between “before” and “after” also entailed an intermingling of past and future for those concerned by the transformation (to quote the famous song from Animaniacs, Germany was “now one piece”). Like the nation, the picture is sort of suspended between two eras, on which it looks back in deliberate contemplation.

The unhurried pace and relatively sparse plot will not appeal to everyone, but they also highlight the work of the real star player of the project: Helena Wittmann, a director in her own right (and fellow Locarno alum with Human Flowers of Flesh) who reteams with Donschen to explore the Germany of yore. Each frame is meticulously planned, each (often static) shot composed in such a manner as to become the defining image of places, moments and people undergoing a profound renewal as everything transformed around them while ostensibly looking the same. It’s an artistic partnership that embraces the apparent paradox of the stillness of the moving image to sequentially revive and immortalize an era that comes to the screen almost frozen in time, the viewer having no choice but to sit in quiet observation, not unlike the characters silently coming to terms with the full ramifications of the events of 1990.

Walking alongside her protagonist, Donschen thinks about tomorrow, as a person and as a filmmaker. And to do so, she had to cast her mind back, to a long time ago, in a country that to some degree certainly feels far, far away. And in bringing it closer, she manages to blend the old and the new in progressively affecting fashion, up to and including the expertly calibrated final shots.

Director, Screenwriter: Luise Donschen
Cast: Gerti Drassl, Manuela Biedermann, Pola Friedrichs, Clemens Bobke, Nele Christoph, Uwe Preuss, Jan Kampmann, Peter Schneider
Producers: Julia Cöllen, Karsten Krause, Frank Scheuffele, Mariam Shatberashvili, Luise Hauschild
Cinematography: Helena Wittmann
Production design: Fanny Welz
Costume design: Marie Gerstenberger, Ulrike Plehn
Sound: Johannes Doberenz, Johann Meis
Production companies: Fünferfilm, New Matter Films
World sales: Fünferfilm
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Concorso Cineasti del presente)
In German
93 minutes

The film opens in 1999, with young Gemma (Charli Penton, in a brief but moving performance) tends to herself as her out-of-it mother (Laura Gordon) slumps in a chair, passed out at the kitchen table. Gemma witnesses what appears to be her mother’s horrific suicide before we jump to the present, where adult Gemma (Amelia Eve, The Haunting of Bly Manor) is determined to do a better job as single parent to her own daughter, Maya (Island Austin, I Can Only Imagine 2). But the arrival of a trio of creepy senior citizens sends Gemma into a series of horrifying nightmares that leave her spiraling, forcing her to repeat her own mother’s erratic and borderline-abusive behavior.

During one of these nightmares, Shaye’s Elise appears, telling Gemma, “Find me on the material plane.” That involves visiting Claire (Maisie Richardson-Sellers, Nine Perfect Strangers), a tattoo artist who, for five minutes at a time, can swap places with Elise, who died years earlier. Elise warns Gemma that she has been targeted by fearsome cult leader Cyrus (Sam Spruell, H Is for Hawk) who wants to use Gemma’s abilities as a “courier” to bring souls from the Further back into reality.

The Further is explained as “the dark void between this world and the next,” and after seeing five of the six Insidious movies, I probably still couldn’t pass a Further pop quiz explaining the rules regarding the place/non-place, and how one enters/exits it. Suffice it to say that writer-director Jacob Chase (Come Play) offers just enough exposition — including a scene where Claire literally acts out how the third act is supposed to unfold — to get even first-time viewers up to speed.

Cyrus and his diabolical plans are something of a MacGuffin here; what really matters is Gemma both learning the truth about and letting go of her past, a tall order given that she’s still living in her childhood home where all the terrible moments of that past took place. Chase finds organic ways to set up his scary set pieces, whether it’s the dentist’s office where Gemma works (oral-care professionals everywhere no doubt resent the mileage that horror movies get out of the sound of a whirring drill) or a claustrophobic maze-like scene that coincidentally resembles a recent horror hit about endless spaces.

Less chilling are Cyrus’ Further-bound minions, a motley collection of creepy ghouls that play like rejected ideas for Beetlejuice’s afterlife waiting room. As they clutch and claw at Gemma, they make less of an impression than our hero’s one-on-one encounters.

2026 will rightly be remembered as the year when lower budgeted, independently produced horror films like Backrooms, Obsession, and It Ends changed the game and spawned a new wave of the genre, but Insidious: Out of the Further proves that a sturdy, studio-made chiller can still make audiences toss their popcorn even if it’s not breaking new cinematic ground.

Director: Jacob Chase
Screenwriter: Jacob Chase
Cast: Amelia Eve, Brandon Perea, Lin Shaye
Executive producers: Steven Schneider, Ryan Turek, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones
Producers: Jason Blum, Oren Peli, James Wan, Leigh Whannell
Director of photography: David Garbett
Production design: Nick Bassett
Editing: Gregory Plotkin
Music: Joseph Bishara
Sound design: Francis Byrne, sound recordist; Paul Hackner, re-recording mixer
Production companies: Screen Gems, Stage 6 Films, Blumhouse, Atomic Monster
In English
106 minutes

Engin (Musab Yilmaz) is turning six inside a women’s prison, where his mother is incarcerated and the walls of which are the world he has known all his life. In Sis Gurdal’s short drama, which plays in the main shorts competition at Sarajevo Film Festival, Engin is – necessarily – removed from that world and sent to live with family he doesn’t know in a coastal village. A tender coming-of-age drama, the film explores how we must adapt to new life circumstances, the nature of coming into contact with masculinity for the first time, and how far a son will go to be reunited with their mother.

The difference between the hermetic world Engin inhabits with his mother (Naz Goktan) and the new home he must adjust to is skillfully managed. The film doesn’t treat this is a careering hand-break turn as much as a subtle but fundamental shift. The colour palette morphs from the pastel walls of the institution to the more naturalistic sun-baked hues of a rural town. Life in the prison is tender and intimate, but ordered, while outside things are looser, freer, and harder to comprehend. Musab Yilmaz, playing Engin, does a wonderful job of conveying a mix of wonder and disorientation.

He makes connections in his new home, with a local girl Nergis (Nur Pera Abuc), who he initially gravitates towards, and then to his older cousin Mustafa (Merdan Karatas), who becomes the first male role model in his life. The first days and weeks of this new life are spent trying to determine how he can return to his mother, but as the film progresses, he must come to terms with the hard reality of the situation he’s been made aware of. Porkatal is a skillfully made short whose ending is crushingly symbolic of Engin’s realisation of his own powerlessness, and what it means to accept such loss and keep on keeping on.

Director, screenwriter: Sis Gurdal
Cast: Musab Yilmaz, Naz Goktan, Nur Pera Abuc, Merdan Karatas
Producers: Laure Dahout, Sinan Yusufoglu
Cinematography: Pablo Garrido Carreras
Editing: Sercan Sezgin, Pablo Gomez-Pan
Music, sound design: Mert Cetinkaya
Production design: Osman Ozcan
Production companies: Si Films (Turkey), Tiresias Films (France)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Short Film Competition)
In Turkish
16 minutes

Read our coverage of more short films in our Verdict Shorts section.

Duraie first caught the eye of international audiences with her short film Give Up the Ghost (2019), which bowed in Venice Orizzonti and went on to win prizes at El Gouna and the Palm Springs ShortFest. Sink, her first feature, has followed its debut in Toronto with extensive fest play around the world, most recently in Amman and Sarajevo. Graced by excellent tech work led by cinematographer Farouk Laaridh, it is notable for its close observation of a fraying family and the frankness with which it presents a son’s nightmarish change in personality as his illness progresses.

Played with tragic intensity by young actor Mohammed Nizar (Gaza Mon Amour), Basil is a med student who pours over videos of heart bypass surgery for his upcoming exams. His mother Nadia (Clara Khoury, The Voice of Hind Rajab) watches along with him. But an incident in class reveals the hidden aggressiveness in the boy’s personality, which is severe enough to get him suspended from school. Mom is in denial and stoutly supports his version of an “accident”, while Dad (played by popular Jordanian comedian Wissam Tobeilah) is doubtful; sadly, their friends uncoolly decide to shun Basil lest he contaminate their kids. Since whatever happened in class took place offscreen, it is impossible for the viewer to know who’s right. It is not the only instance in the film of ambiguity deliberately clouding the story.

The father, always a barely-there character, packs a bag and disappears from the story with Basil’s basketball-playing brother and their little sister Dima, who gives Basil her unconditional love despite considering him a little weird and scary. As Nadia is about to find out.

Alone at home, Nadia and Basil at first enjoy their common passion for floating weightlessly in a covered swimming pool, a clever metaphor for a quasi-amniotic bond. The film’s rhythm picks up in a series of increasingly shocking scenes, beginning with Basil locking Nadia out of the house. It is nightfall before he opens the door. That night, she wakes to see him watching her sleep, the first of the scary moments that go on escalating until the film reaches its inevitable climax.

Khoury gives a very believable, realistic performance as the dismayed mother, who suddenly realizes she cannot control her son’s frantic exhibitionism in a restaurant where he makes her dance with him; later he almost crashes the car before running wild in a park. Still Nadia tries her best to understand him, even acting out with him in a chicken-clucking mud fight at one point. But with little dialogue at her disposal, she is too often left in martyred silence, staring meaningfully at Basil. Even a terrifying scene in which the boy aggressively pulls a huge rubber rabbit mask over her head while he brays like a donkey is virtually mute.

Nizar, as the unraveling son, can be riveting in scenes like these where he unexpectedly lets his inner wildman loose and reveals frightening new twists to a disintegrating mind. It is a memorable role that takes him through unsettling physical permutations as well as mental, and heralds a talent to watch.

Director, screenwriter: Zain Duraie
Cast: Clara Khoury, Mohammad Nizar, Wissam Tobeileh
Producers: Alaa Alasad, Hind Anabtawi
Cinematography: Farouk Laaridh
Editing: Abdallah Sada
Production design: Yasmine Nassar
Costume design: Farah Karouta
Music: Ted Regklis
Sound: Isra Banuelos
Production companies: Tabi360 (Jordan), The Jordan Film Fund, the Doha Film Institute (Qatar), The Red Sea Fund (Saudi Arabia), AFAC (Lebanon)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (SFF Partner Presents)
In Arabic
88 minutes

17 begins right at the moment an encounter between Sara (Kostic) and two classmates goes horribly wrong, and becomes nonconsensual — a traumatic experience that will change everything for her. Tight framing takes us right inside these aggressive, disturbing moments in a way that is harrowing and uncomfortably confronting. Mitic is resolved, throughout the film, to show events head-on rather than just inferring them, a valid choice that makes for a relentlessly unpleasant viewing experience which shakes audiences up, and makes it impossible for certain painful realities to be glossed over or ignored.

Fast-forward to the end of the school year, and the remainder of the film plays out over two days, as Sara joins a school trip bound by bus from Macedonia for Greece across the EU border, via an overnight stopoff in the city of Bitola. She is irritable and withdrawn, detached from the raucous interactions of her peers as she stares out the window ruminating, or sneaks off to calm her nerves by smoking a clandestine joint. Almost a third of the way in, a further revelation comes regarding the aftermath of the assault that is so troubling her, and which she has kept to herself.

Sara’s shame and isolation over her overwhelming predicament is a by-product, we come to understand, of a dog-eat-dog environment that is fuelled by stigmatising rumours and a rarely questioned reverence for machismo, rather than supportive community. The majority of the students have an aggressive and volatile disdain for rules and boundaries of all types. For their part, the conspicuously hands-off, lackadaisical teachers are fine for their charges to blow off a planned museum visit and, busy drinking and flirting among themselves, raise no eyebrows at teens ordering a taxi to hit up a nightclub in town.

There is a sustained nastiness to the antics of the teens who, high on hormones and petty rivalries, goad and mock each other, in situations that, mixed with alcohol and adrenaline, spill over into violence time and again. The Bitola hotel, packed-out with students, is shot by D.O.P. Naum Doksevski as a sprawling space of unseen corners, even as frequent close-ups feed a sense of airless claustrophobia, especially in combination with the many rowdy and hostile scenes on the bus. In a credibility-stretching moment that leans into overkill in its efforts to underscore teens unguided and out of control, even a hotel worker is punched.

There are numerous small moments, too, of connection that build amid the pain, especially between Sara and Lina (Martina Danilovska), who have to reluctantly share a hotel room, along with resident mean girl and self-appointed life of the party Nina (Eva Stojchevska), who has attracted the attention of Sara’s ex-boyfriend. Lina is just as potentially vulnerable as Sara had been in her desire to fit in and explore her burgeoning sexuality, leading to a particularly disturbing party scene and another crisis situation, which pushes the sense of prevailing apathy entrenched in the school to the limit.

The misanthropy and nihilism that imbue the film do leave room for hope, ultimately suggesting that solidarity with each other may be the salvation for these young women, and just might be enough for them to escape this climate of misogyny and everyday exploitation, to create a meaningful future governed by love.

Director: Kosara Mitic
Writers: Kosara Mitic, Ognjen Svilicic
Producers: Tomi Salkovski
Cast: Eva Kostic, Martina Danilovska, Dame Joveski, Eva Stojchevska, Petar Manic
Cinematographer: Naum Doksevski
Editor: Vladimir Pavlovski
Sound: Aljaz Lukan
Production companies: Black Cat Production (North Macedonia), Art & Popcorn (Serbia), December (Slovenia)
Sales: Totem Films
Venue: Sarajevo (Narrative Feature Film competition)
In Macedonian
105 minutes

An emotionally raw drama edged with dark humour, it comes after her similarly themed 2018 portrait of a directionless twenty-something My Last Year As a Loser. Its acerbic bite, and a screenplay well-attuned to the way in which real-world connections are in crisis, as isolation and over-sharing paradoxically co-exist on social media apps, give a shot of fresh energy to the story of a formative vacation friendship between two angst-ridden young women, which otherwise slots into well-trodden coming-of-age territory, even though these off-course late bloomers are already adults.

Alja (Klara Kuk) has garnered a following as a loneliness influencer. She posts regular online content about having no friends, cooking Christmas dinner for one and other days passed solo. She doesn’t miss a day even when she can hardly stand up, due to a mystery illness that leaves her weak and coughing up blood. Things are no rosier for Marusa (an especially spiky Anusha Kodelja), who has just lost her mother to terminal disease. It’s been eight months since she came back to Slovenia to care for her, a stint during which her boyfriend in Berlin wasted no time cheating on her. She had already alienated her best hometown friend by not repaying a debt, and now she has gone off the rails partying as the only way she knows how to cope, even if losing control means throwing up in her purse at the funeral and other indignities.

Marusa’s shame spirals, adding to the unease of staying with her father and his children from another marriage on the farm where she grew up but now feels like an outsider. Alja’s posts, and their frequent message exchanges about their sense of alienation and everyday humiliations are a source of comfort. It’s on an impulse, drunk and high on prescription pills, that Marusa ends up at Alja’s door in a small German town after a bus ride with Billie, her late mother’s pet Dachshund, in tow, needing somewhere to crash, and a break from all of the scrutiny.

The lead actresses offer us up a convincing, awkward dance, oscillating between intrusiveness and guardedness, between two women who are superficially familiar to each other yet also strangers, and whose real-world social skills and grasp of healthy boundaries are not their strong suits. Marusa agrees to stay on for New Year in the town where Alja, who works as a nurse, decided to remain after her affair with a married man blew up.

The wintry backwater of Germany where the friends pass time is shot by D.O.P. Roy van Egmond with an eye for chilly, desolate beaches and inky night skies. The result is sufficiently atmospheric, though the off-season coastal locale remains rather functional, with a kind of placeless, western European could-be-anywhere feel to it.

Uncomfortable revelations are to come, as the two friends share more of themselves, and discover parts of each other they are unable to edit, as they can for optimal online reactions, when in close physical proximity. This is a film that, admirably, embraces flawed women without judgment (less so, the men all too happy to exploit them, another wise scripting decision.) Menart understands the seductions of technology, but is deeply sceptical of it as a marketed remedy for solitude, and is full of empathy for the desperate and dysfunctional coping mechanisms that young women sometimes cling to in times of great need, hiding their pain behind brittle exteriors amid efforts at validation.

Self-harm as a cry for help, through gradual actions as much as dramatic ones, is a theme. It is never romanticised or sensationalised, especially in its most disturbing (and more medically urgent) forms, with the director ultimately interested not in self-destruction but the small moments of connection that can prompt big shifts in thinking. This is also, ultimately, a film about expectations and disappointment, and the acceptance that is necessary for really growing up.

Director, screenwriter: Ursa Menart
Producers: Katja Lenarcic, Danijel Hocevar
Cast: Anusha Kodelja, Klara Kuk, Mojca Fatur, Marjuta Slamic
Cinematographer: Roy van Egmond
Editor: Lukas Miheljak
Music: Alenja Pivko Knezevic, Simon Pensek
Production companies: Vertigo (Slovenia), Thalia Production (Serbia), Chromosom Film (Germany), Living Pictures (Germany)
Sales: Duplicato Media
Venue: Sarajevo (Narrative Feature Film Competition)
In Slovene
80 minutes

Yes, the Italian city is at the center of this youthful tale, focusing on a French school class on a field trip in the neighboring country. Specifically, besides Naples itself, they’re in the area to visit the ruins of Pompeii and the bodies that turned to stone after the fateful eruption of Mount Vesuvius a couple of millennia ago. The visual impact of the relics of ages past, as well as the somewhat magical quality of the city which, like many locales in southern Italy, maintains strong ties to ancient customs and rituals, have their effect on the visiting youngsters, particularly one boy named Toni. By the end of the trip, no stone will be left unturned, emotionally.

Shot entirely with non-professional actors (the director claims to have taken her cue from a similarly youth-centric series produced by the French channel Arte), the film accompanies its teenage ensemble on a journey that is a discovery for them, the filmmakers, and us: per Atlan’s statements at the time of the film’s Cannes premiere, Naples is a difficult city to capture on celluloid, due to how dense and complex it is, so she decided – in tandem with co-cinematographer Pierre Mazoyer – to adopt Toni’s point of view and observe her surroundings in an attempt to understand them. The gaze through which we walk among the Neapolitans is at once awestruck and awe-inspiring, conveying the mystery and beauty of a city that, at least in Italian parlance, is so gorgeous one could die after seeing it up close (“Vedi Napoli e poi muori”, the saying goes).

The observational aesthetic has a documentary feel to it, capturing glimpses of everyday life without initially concerning itself too much with any dramatic thrust. Though clearly meticulously crafted (as becomes evident in the third act when the character arcs need to reach their natural conclusion), the film comes across as loose and lively, as though it were in service of the young protagonists and not the other way around. And through that apparent looseness it generates a lived-in quality to such a degree that, nearly two and a half hours after we started watching, we can’t help but feel we’ve become part of the group and would like to tag along for another trip.

Myth (the title is connected to a Pompeii artwork) and reality converge to craft an outsider’s view that is nonetheless of a piece with the earthy charm of Naples and its immortal atmosphere. Wherever Atlan goes next, this first leg of her new cinematic journey is a mesmerizingly solid foundation to build upon.

Directors: Marine Atlan
Screenwriters: Marine Atlan, Anne Brouillet
Cast: Colas Guignard, Suzanne Gerin, Mitia Capellier, Antonia Buresi
Producer: Inès Daïen Dasi, Angelo Barbagallo
Cinematography: Pierre Mazoyer, Marine Atlan
Sound: Paul Guilloteau
Production companies: Les Films du Poisson, BiBi Film
World sales: mk2 Films
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Kinoscope)
In French, Italian
146 minutes

This half-hour short film from Elisabeth Jakobi and Maximilian Conway courtesy of the Film Academy of Vienna drops the viewer in media res, with carer Toni (Christoph Kohlbacher) suspected for some missing pills and desperately trying to kick-start his ailing football career despite niggling injury. Screening this week as part of the student competition at Sarajevo, the film is a well put together and impressively acted drama about the dangers of being reckless and self-centred in the pursuit of your dreams.

The film particularly excels in its depiction of Toni and his partner Nadia’s (Lorena Emmi Mayer) home life; the quiet chaos of a large family in cramped conditions, children taking care of themselves while the adults work long hours of shift work, and everyone on top of each other at all times. Both the adult and child actors are all excellent, as money worries, conflicting priorities and difficult infants strain the situation that is still anchored in care and love. It is slightly less convincing on the football field, where Toni’s devotion feels marginally less authentic. But when an agent coming to watch him play promises a transfer to a bigger club, some financial leeway comes into sight.

As Toni, Kohlbacher exudes a particular energy. He seems to always be trying to play it cool and confident, but there is a jittery edginess to him throughout. It comes through in his desire to resist any kind of authority, be the focal point during his team’s football matches, and in an apparently constant motion in his daily life. He never feels settled, like he’s being driven by a restlessness that he can’t quite channel in a productive direction. Konstantin Johann’s handheld photography helps to emphasise these elements, creating a tension that only ever ebbs when Toni is with Nadia, but it sadly never seems enough comfort for him to settle.

Director: Elisabeth Jakobi, Maximilian Conway
Screenplay: Elisabeth Jakobi
Cast: Christoph Kohlbacher, Lorena Emmi Mayer, Ida Beier, Luise Morawetz, Savita Brosenbauer
Producers: Dominic Kubisch, Julia Stempelova
Cinematography: Konstantin Johann
Editing: Alexander Worsch
Music: Florian Seyser-Trenk, Felix Romer
Sound: Fabian Hainzl
Production design: Laura Huber
Production companies: Filmadacdemy Vienna (Austria)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Student Short Film Competition)
In German
30 minutes

Read our coverage of more short films in our Verdict Shorts section.

Taking viewers back to a long-lost country torn apart by gun-toting outlaws and ethnic conflict, The Balkan Cowboy could have been called Once Upon a Time in the Wild East. With backing from Screen Ireland and Irish broadcaster RTE, it world premieres in competition at the Sarajevo Film Festival this week. Assembled with style and wit, plus timely observations on the current global rise in toxic nationalism, this Irish-Croatian co-production feels well-primed for further festivals and wider audience appeal.

A prize-winning visual artist, photographer and assistant professor at Dublin City University, Jurišic grew up in the former Yugoslavia, but left in 1991 when the Balkans split into warring factions. She can never go home again, she says wistfully, because the country of her birth is now a mythical lost land, “like Atlantis.” She settled in Ireland because “it looked safe and the people seemed kind,” but recent anti-immigrant protests in her adopted homeland have been a depressing reminder that right-wing nativism is resurgent again across Europe.

In The Balkan Cowboy, Jurišic travels to Bijeljina in northeastern Bosnia-Herzegovina, close to the Serbian border. Her primary mission is to pay homage to a photographer called Aljuš Musli, an obsessive underground film-maker who made a series of zero-budget 8mm Balkan westerns in the 1970s and 1980s under the pseudonym Hari Džekson (aka Harry Jackson), a name he adopted to sound more like a Hollywood cowboy director. A popular local figure who never enjoyed wider success, Musli shot these mini-epics with an entirely amateur cast and crew, recruiting people from the local Roma community to play Native Americans. On a more personal note, he was also a crucial mentor figure to Jurišic and her family, encouraging both her and her father to take up photography.

When Yugoslavia was torn apart by civil war in the 1990s, citizens of Albanian-Muslim heritage like Musli suddenly faced mortal danger as Serbian nationalists began occupying and terrorising neighbouring states. In April 1992, paramilitary forces led by the notorious Željko “Arkan” Ražnatovic massacred around 50 Bosnian Muslims in Bijeljina as part of Serbia’s wider “ethnic cleansing” strategy. The occupiers also carried out torture, rape, beatings, looting, extortion and burning of Mosques. In an act of stubborn defiance, or possibly madness, Musli elected not to follow his wife and family into exile. Amazingly, he survived the conflict, but was repeatedly arrested on trumped-up charges and brutally beaten by Serbian thugs, his life and business destroyed.

Approaching this factual material through the lens of a creative artist, Jurišic channels Musli’s spirit by hosting auditions in Bijeljina for a DIY western of her own, an inspired idea which sparks a  quick-fire montage of comic vignettes. This film-shoot format becomes a fertile vehicle for her to interview numerous locals about their memories of the elusive “Hari Džekson”, including her own father. She intercuts contemporary footage with clips from the classic Hollywood western Shane (1953), one of Musli’s favourites, highlighting the real-life parallels in its stark depiction of violent gunmen fighting over disputed land ownership.

Jurišic initially teases viewers with conflicting folklore around Musli’s final years. While some claim he strapped on his six-shooters for an audacious Wild West showdown with Arkan’s men, others speculate that he may still be alive. At first the director seems to dance around the truth in the style of Searching for Sugarman (2012), but she eventually confirms that Musli died a few years after the war, homeless and broke. Too fuzzy on detail, this closing section is where the film feels weakest. Musli was obviously a slippery character who left behind only a scrappy legacy, but Jurišic could have dug deeper into his psyche during her interviews with former friends and loved ones, including his widow. A more journalistically rigorous documentary would have drawn some firmer conclusions, and mapped out a more robust narrative arc.

But these are minor shortcomings in an otherwise highly engaging, big-hearted project. The Balkan Cowboy is an enjoyably quirky deep dive into the faded celluloid of half-remembered history, peppered with charming musical interludes and framed with the keen eye of a visual artist. It comes as no surprise that Jurišic used some of the same material for a Dublin gallery show earlier this year. Concluding with a bleak reminder that nobody has ever been brought to justice for the war crimes in Bijeljina, her recurring mantra, as bitingly urgent today as it was 30 years ago, is that “nationalism kills good people, and kills the good in people.”

Director, screenwriter: Dragana Jurišic
Cinematography: Eleanor Bowman
Editing: Paul Mullen
Music: Michael Fleming
Sound design: Zoran Medved, Luka Gamulin
Producers: Oliver Sertic, Anna Rodgers, Zlata Filipovic
Production companies: Invisible Thread (Ireland), Restart (Croatia)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Documentary Competition)
In English, Bosnian
93 minutes

Read more of our coverage from Sarajevo Film Festival 2026

Hana Selena Sokolovic’s short documentary uses the journal of her older sister, Selma Parisi to both explore the nature of fleeing war-torn Bosnia and to prompt a charming scrapbook aesthetic through which she then tells this family story. Selma and her other sister, Senka, let Sarajevo and travelled through Bosnia and Croatia during the siege in 1992 and Selma’s reflections in her diary give a rather unique perspective on an experience that will be very familiar to audiences at the Sarajevo Film Festival, where the film competes in the documentary competition this week having premiered earlier in the year at Rotterdam.

The diary is a mixture of elements, some which explicitly tackle their situation and what it means for a young girl to have been forced to leave her home and family. Other parts imply the difficulties of that flight while there is a recurring motif of invented songs that Selma has written out and dated. Selma herself narrates the film alongside her own daughter, Sara, who gives some of the entries a more authentic childlike quality despite the undeniably grown-up world she was facing.

This childlike perspective is fully embraced by Sokolovic who uses the visual elements of the original diaries to create a patchwork, almost video collage, style. In some instances the entire screen is covered by the texture of lined paper and both the words and some doodles from the margins appear – trees, flowers, shapes, hearts. They then bleed from the evident notebook sections into archival materials and newly shot footage – Selma’s hand drawn flowers suddenly popping up along a roadside shot by Hana, three ladies that have come to represent the sisters slide into frame in various locations.

Dear Orchid feels like a genuine attempt to represent the diary, in the same way that the diary is a genuine attempt to capture personal experience. This creative approach marries the personal and political in a way that gives the film a power that may not initially, on the surface, be obvious.

Director, screenplay, cinematography, editing: Hana Selena Sokolovic
Narrated by: Selma Parisi, Sara Parisi
Animation: Marija Despodova
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Documentary Competition – Short Film)
In English, Bosnian
18 minutes

Read our coverage of more short films in our Verdict Shorts section.

It’s the fourth feature from Juric, a respected though not especially prolific, downbeat chronicler of Croatian realities. It is based on a short story by Croatian writer Jurica Pavicic, a genesis that, as its title suggests, can be felt in its slim, snapshot-like scope, and a restrained subtlety that means much is left unsaid in its portrait of a family forced to confront buried tensions in the lead-up to a death. But great inner expanses can be revealed by the most modest of gestures, and a moving payoff comes in the last scenes for those attuned to emotional undercurrents and details, though commercial prospects may be limited by the stripped-back simplicity and lack of propulsive narrative spectacle.

An ageing, and ailing, father (Izudin Bajrovic) knows he doesn’t have much time left, and although he is quietly and deeply attached to the land and olive grove where he has lived by the sea, he readily concedes that it is time to allow his children to sell it and divide the proceeds, even though faceless corporate interests are hovering, and his neighbour’s ability to reach his vineyard by crossing over his land may no longer be guaranteed. More pressing than the impersonal changes that may be wrought by external interests are the old faultlines in the family that the inheritance shakes up, and a promise that could see the money unequally shared out.

Two sisters, the recently separated and struggling Anica (Marija Skaricic), and no-nonsense Irena (Ivana Roscic), who is also grieving a loss, have travelled to the island for the weekend with Irena’s two children. With the weather wintry, and their taciturn, unwell father in no mood to play host, preferring to smoke pot in bed for his aching joints, it is not long before restlessness and frayed nerves take hold between those cooped up in the small house. Static framing by D.O.P. Marko Brdar and a muted palate of browns and yellows effectively creating a claustrophobic sense of stuckness.

The other sibling, Ivan, has been living on the island. His depressed psychological state and the frailty of his weight loss soon becomes the family’s focus, as he refuses to join family meals,  and they discuss whether to try to corral him into psychiatric care in Split. Ivan is played by Juraj Lerotic, the director of acclaimed 2022 Croatian arthouse drama Safe Place, another film about mental health issues within a family. He is an intense, magnetic presence, despite his minimal dialogue. Like his father, Ivan is not one to hash out his intentions or motivations, but a gradual dignity takes hold that points us beyond the realm of the pragmatic and the material concerns that so preoccupy Anica and Irena.

Tense interactions between various family members reveal a thorny tangle of misunderstandings, distances and buried resentments, as assumptions over who is really most in need of help in the family are drawn into question. This remains more a brief portrait in time than a narrative with many twists and turns. But occasionally less can be more. As night closes in and bad weather cuts the island off, the spectre of mortality looms nearer in the shadowy light of bedtable lamps, and the groundwork for enough atmosphere and emotional force is laid for the final scenes to hit home with an understated and sensitive profundity.

Director: Zvonimir Juric
Writers: Zvonimir Juric, Jurica Pavicic
Producers: Ankica Juric Tilic, Dragan Juric
Cast: Marija Skaricic, Ivana Roscic, Izudin Bajrovic, Juraj Lerotic
Cinematographer: Marko Brdar
Editor: Ana Stulina
Sound: Julij Zornik, Ognjen Popi?
Production companies: Kinorama (Croatia), Forum Ljubljana (Slovenia), Atalanta (Serbia)
Sales: Duplicato Media
Venue: Sarajevo (Narrative Feature Film competition)
In Croatian
80 minutes

The small town of Resita in the west of Romania is shot in static, long takes that emphasise its nondescript, anywhere-ville nature. But a burst of chaotic crimes immediately throws us into the uncomfortable realisation that hostility is out of control within the community. First, a masked gang of teens on bikes slashes the tyres of cars in an area where many Roma live, and leaves signs with racist slogans on windows. Then, the corpse of a man beaten to death by the youths for intervening lies at the hospital awaiting autopsy, its mass framed as a brutally unceremonious fact. An overnight rampage through the morgue by Roma intent on reclaiming the body and saving it from desecration by clinical scalpel has been unsuccessful.

Marius (Adrian Vancica, suitably commanding and cold), a widower who moved back to his hometown after aceing medical school, is long accustomed, as the local hospital’s chief, to being a big fish in a small pond. But he reveals jaded cynicism in long, philosophical conversations with his lover Dana (Cristina Richter), who he pays visits out of convenience rather than love, and with his former schoolmate Silviu (Alex Conovaru), who is now the town’s police chief and favours harsh measures against any suspected law-breakers who cross his path. Marius believes an iron toughness is the only way to motivate those around him, but niggling doubts have crept in over his perceived greatness, and whether it is any longer relevant in a society that has stopped valuing the rugged charms of supposed “real” men.

Marius laments that his son Ioan (a convincingly nervy Teodor Butanescu) has little direction or ambition, repeating the proverb that every crow thinks his chick is a swan. But the extent of his offspring’s failings will only gradually become apparent, as the real reason for his leg injury emerges, and the cops come calling to search for the yellow bicycle that was involved in the murder, in scenes as dark and deadpan as some of the best Romanian police procedurals.

The school reunion of Marius’s 1995 graduation class is an on-the-nose coda that underlines the positioning, already set up in conversations, of the narrative conflicts within the wider scope of a flawed education system and a misguided obsession with social status over actual integrity. Marius is above the masses because his professional standing tells him so, according to this logic — and even if his confidence is fading, when it comes to the crunch, he will pass this code of untouchability, which those on the margins cannot access, onto his son.

Serban, with a steady and deliberate hand, takes time delineating this world and its outmoded rules in a film that stretches beyond two and a half hours, but never feels bloated. Revelations, when they come, hit like precise, cold hammers more shocking than fists in the midst of sharp dialogue, exposing characters’ true natures, even if consequences may not come at once in a town where myriad unseen mechanisms protect the powerful. The family’s grandiose illusions about themselves are crumbling fast, but living any other way requires more imagination than they’ve as yet been able to muster.

Director, writer, producer, editor: Florin Serban
Cast: Adrian Vancica, Teodor Butanescu, Cristina Richter, Alex Conovaru, Izdraila Janir
Cinematographer: Liviu Marghidan
Music: Marius Leftarache, Nikita Dembinski
Production design: Bogdan Ionescu
Production company: Fantascope Films (Romania)
Sales: REASON8
Venue: Sarajevo (Narrative Feature Competition)
In Romanian
154 minutes

The director reckons with the pain of exile from his hometown of Mostar, and its complexity as an ongoing source of family tension, chiefly around his politician father Roko’s reluctance to evacuate the family despite the escalating bloodshed in the ‘90s, and his later reluctance to return in peacetime, leaving the family scattered between countries. While this boldly frank, unsentimental survey of a destabilised past and unsettled future feels chiefly like a private, last-ditch attempt at reconciliation with an ageing parent, Markovina’s willingness to candidly lay these family faultlines bare should resonate widely in an era rocked by global displacement.

A world of resentment simmers up to colour kitchen-table conversations that are long overdue, or simply impossible to conclude, as Roko and his wife Zinaida, who live in self-imposed exile on an island, field hard questions from the director and his brother Dragan, now a left-wing intellectual and writer. Most films of this sort lean toward nostalgia and hagiography; in stark, refreshing contrast, the younger Markovinas have no desire to blindly perpetuate what they describe as the myth their father has forced them to live with.

Roko, as we learn, was a member of parliament for the League of Communists, the party that governed the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after World War Two. A stubborn idealist, he insisted that the peoples making up Yugoslavia should stay unified, even as it was breaking apart and many of his party cohorts pragmatically shifted allegiances to throw their lot in with the nationalists on the ascendant. He kept his family in Mostar as war came, with them finally fleeing only through traumatic shell bombardment in 1992, and later voted against the Dayton Agreement, which ended the Bosnian War but codified division. He now claims Mostar, where he switched from an influential citizen to a pariah, is too riven by sectarian hatred to return.

Damir and Dragan are determined to debunk his refusal to adapt, arguing an idealism so inflexible over time can be destructive, and that vengeance is no route for healing and co-existence. Dragan, like thousands of others who left, now lives in Mostar again, rejects the idea it’s a ruined city, saying even the Serbs who backed nationalism should return to their place in the shared fabric. Damir is in Zagreb, but is equally aggrieved that his father endangered the family to save face in the community, and now cannot seem to move on.

Archival ‘90s footage showing Bosnia on the brink of war is spliced in, which provides a sense of tense immediacy and historical context to what could otherwise seem quite insular family dynamics, and is particularly helpful as a scene-setter for those not well-versed in the region’s history. In Sarajevo, there’s an anti-war rally; in parliamentary speeches, Bosnian Serb politician Radovan Karadzic, who would later be found guilty of genocide, declares Serbs will not accept becoming a national minority in their own country; Bosniaks are rounded up in Mostar (explanatory red text helpfully orients audiences through material especially chilling in hindsight.) Family home-video footage is projected onto walls, an artistic choice that underscores the past’s inseparability from the present, and its need of re-integration.

An urge to not just persuade, but listen and understand his father, is palpable in the conversations the director instigates, and in them a sense emerges of the extent of the losses his father experienced. As head of the civil defense in Mostar, formed after the supposed Yugoslav army armed and backed Serb forces and paramilitaries, he recalls burying 386 people killed by shells in a park he repurposed as a cemetery. He also recounts how the house the family had lived in for nearly two decades was seized and reassigned to a Croatian officer, who stayed there for seven years. His pain and bitterness are easy, through these recollections, to understand. The burning question of the documentary, which succeeds in bringing the demographic change in Mostar in ethnic composition to life far beyond mere statistical numbers, becomes how any citizens that have inflicted atrocities upon one another can co-exist and heal.

Director: Damir Markovina
Editors: Marta Breges, Vladimir Gojun
Cinematographers: Tomislav Krnic, Kresimia Stulina, Damir Markovina
Producer: Tamara Babun Zovko
Production companies: Wolfgang & Dolly (Croatia), Osoba D (Croatia), Al Jazeera Balkans (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Sales: Wolfgang & Dolly
Venue: Sarajevo (Documentary Competition)
In Bosnian, Croatian
75 minutes

These are the words of one of the interviewees from Nicolas Gourault’s new film, Their Eyes, in which ‘clickworkers’ from the Philippines, Kenya, and Venezuela discuss their jobs assessing imagery from self-driving cars and annotated them to teach the artificial intelligence what it is looking at. This is not Gourault’s first film that has engaged with this subject, having made the fantastic short VO (2020) which was about the human workers training driverless cars. In this instance, the labour is one step further removed, but the film delves into the inequality inherent in the system of labour as well as some of the chilling ways in which this information is being organised.

The work itself is a time-intensive but straightforward. The workers are sent images and tasked with ‘segmentation’ which involves using their mouse to outline the shapes of people, vehicles, buildings, vegetation and other objects within the frame and labelling each one. This process allows for some interesting visuals for Gourault, which overlay the real world with this bright Dayglo colours, almost making the film appear at first glance like animation. Yellow buildings rise into a pink sky while blue cars drift down a highway.

Through the voiceovers of several workers, the audience learns what will hardly be a surprise – that workers are exploited in the harvesting of this data, with workers in Venezuela paid $0.20 per task while workers in the US receive $2.00 for the same work. Some have tried to find ways around this – by using VPNs to increase their pay – but one voice suggests the situation is scarcely better than slavery.

Perhaps more chilling are the instructions given to these workers about how to classify what is on screen: in one sequence a worker explains that while police officers marshalling a protest should be annotated as ‘human’, the protestors should not be. More alarming still, people covered in sheets – such as rough-sleepers – should be classified as ‘objects.’ Their Eyes is an engaging film and visually interesting, but more importantly a stark reminder of the huge inequality that is baked into so much technological progress.

Director, graphics: Nicolas Gourault
Cast: Oliver, Elvina, Yvon, Yonaille, Jonel
Producers: Quentin Brayer, Yannick Beauquis
Editing: Lucas Azemar, Felix Rehm, Nicolas Gourault
Sound: Romain Ozanne, Etienne Andre
Production companies: Don Quichotte Films (France)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (European Short Film Competition)
In English, Spanish
23 minutes

Read our coverage of more short films in our Verdict Shorts section.

Screening in the Kinoscope section of the Sarajevo Film Festival on the close heels of its world premiere at Locarno, this is a queer and seductively chic catalogue of the designer trappings and fixations of a romantic couple who are both cutting-edge hand surgeons, which inhabits the same galaxy of formalist precision and obsession as the work of director Peter Greenaway. It is a film that is bound to divide audiences (some will be thrilled by its risque archness; others more welded to narrative propulsion will find its aesthetic contrivances and provocations superficially thin), but it should generate a fandom numerous enough to ensure a long festival life, helped by an all-out hallucinogenic and pulsating, magnificently realised finale.

Ingeborg (Aenne Schwarz) and Adam (Louis Hoffman) are thirty-somethings who, in an unnamed German city, cohabit in a meticulously appointed apartment where all the decor and appliances are a complementary shade of white or hazelnut, and worthy of a magazine spread. The in-synch couple, who share the same niche profession as medical specialists and have become darlings with the press as a result of their innovative experiments involving resewed fingers, even co-ordinate their outfits, eating their matching boiled eggs at the breakfast table together each day in black suits and fashion-forward, severe haircuts. Outside the austere, gleaming rooms of the hospital, where they sometimes steal steamy encounters, they vintage-shop, with a tactile enthusiasm and zealous fingers that gravitate to the textures of fur and leather, or visit a red-lit nightclub, where the titillation is enabled by swapping snaps from Polaroid photobooths.

But all is not harmonious ease with the duo of lovers, who despite their well-oiled routine thrive on transgression, and are dependent on an ailing planet in crisis for the earthquakes, wildfires and tsunamis that drive their “apocalyptic fetishism,” not to mention the ambiguous tension that a mysterious third party brings to their dynamic, when ardent thief Ingeborg meets Gaia (Piaffe lead Simone Bucio) by chance after falling during a hectic getaway on foot from the subway with a lighter stolen from a fellow passenger. Ingeborg goes back to work with a custom-made leg brace, and myriad new erotic possibilities for pleasure and a holistic reconnection with the environment. Not one to be left out, Adam, who fantasises about being treated like a doll, takes to wearing a wooden corset, another head-turning oddity that adds to the feats of costuming, by turns beguiling and alarming, by Carmen Di Pinto.

Oren revels in the absurd, with a mischief that offsets the avant-garde starkness of so much precision, and a penchant for wildness that brings the great equaliser of nature into the mix as mind-bending mushrooms start to sprout in astonishing places, bringing a sensual intensity shot by D.O.P. Juan Sarmiento G. on luscious and radiant 16mm. Psychedelic experiences are tough to reproduce on film with any real transporting splendour; for its visionary achievements in this area alone, not to mention its other peculiar diversions, Objet a is worthy of attention. This is a film of episodes and transmutations, in which progression comes less through a conventional dramatic structure of plot happenings, but small revolutions of the body and its curious interactions with a world of objects and beings through endless inventive and at times downright trippy interventions.

Director: Ann Oren
Writers: Ann Oren, Geoffroy Grison
Producers: Kristof Gerega, Fabian Altenried, Sophie Ahrens
Cast: Aenne Schwarz, Louis Hofmann, Simone Bucio, Georg Friedrich, Sofia Kokkali
Cinematographer: Juan Sarmiento G.
Editor: Hansjoerg Weissbrich
Sound: Persefoni Miliou
Music: Kyan Bayani
Costume design: Carmen Di Pinto
Production companies: Schuldenberg Films (Germany), Tarantula Luxembourg (Luxembourg), asterisk* (Greece)
Sales: Bendita Film Sales
Venue: Sarajevo (Kinoscope)
In German
95 minutes

Bulgaria’s arthouse directors are proving themselves endlessly adept and eager to address the theme of endemic corruption under the strain of capitalism and the resulting loss of dignity for the everyperson, and Black Money should travel easily on the festival circuit as an incisive yet robustly entertaining addition to this growing niche. It’s the fifth feature from Grozeva and Valchanov, who won Karlovy Vary’s top award in 2019 for The Father, another biting comedy about charlatanism. As a sharp, cynical satire on the collapse of community and the kind of financial scams that can leave whole lives in tatters, Black Money also recalls another recent Bulgarian winner from Karlovy Vary, director Stephan Komandarev’s 2023 Blaga’s Lessons.

The lifestyle aspirations of sixty-somethings Marina (Tanya Shahova) and her husband Gosha (Ivan Savov) are lampooned as uninspired and even a little tacky from the off. Artistic director Ivelina Mineva has pulled off a coup with the couple’s acid-green and orange living room, the birch-tree forest wallpaper encasing the couple in an imagined elsewhere that has a nightmarish gleam all the more potent when it’s announced on the news that Russia has just invaded Ukraine, a political reality the couple decide to sidestep, amorally content to look the other way so as not to puncture the fantasy of an idyllic vacation. After all, Marina needs such an occasion to wear the animal-print attire and other thrift-store items that she bought for the trip and shows off in an impromptu fashion parade at home.

The self-serving amorality that flourishes in a dog-eat-dog society in which living legally is not enough for a comfortable life is taken aim at very effectively in a film that, amid its jokes, makes room for a real undertow of sadness. The cracks in Marina and Gosha’s relationship widen as they react very differently to the fix they are in, and past secrets reemerge when the couple call on Marina’s sister Lucy (Margita Gosheva) for a hand. Despite the film’s ruthlessly satirical edges, there is also tenderness for the couple’s failings, and their hopeful naivete and determination to garner small joys in a world that offers scant opportunity for glory for anyone but the most powerful fish in an inescapable, muddy pond of lawlessness. Their detachment from politics is underlined even more, when they are caught between a Pride parade and far-right counter-protesters in the capital, which only makes them even more disoriented.

Marina, belatedly gnawed by guilt over pocketing banknotes from patients for preferential treatment as a maternity ward nurse, concludes the scam is God’s punishment. But Gosha, who as a station master as in on a side-hustle in stolen diesel, is not willing to take their humiliation lying down, and in a plot that stretches credibility as it gains in suspense and all-out danger, he gets in way over his head in a Bulgarian underworld of seedy bars and debt-collection heavies. Black money is the instigator not of dreams but of disintegration for this pair whose ordinariness the directors are at pains to point out; their fate not an outlier but a symptom of a wider decay. A tremendous, pitch-black finale as the credits roll is worth the wait, alleviating the relentless downward spiral by wryly suggesting capitalist Bulgaria might be a place not to escape, but to suffer together.

Directors: Kristina Grozeva, Petar Valchanov
Writers: Kristina Grozeva, Petar Valchanov, Decho Taralezhkov
Producers: Konstantina Stavrianou, Irini Vougioukalou, Kristina Grozeva, Petar Valchanov
Cast: Tanya Shahova, Ivan Savov, Margita Gosheva, Ivan Barnev, Sibila Petrova
Cinematographer: Alexander Stanishev
Editor: Yorgos Mavropsaridis
Music: Theodore Oikonomou
Sound: Ivan Andreev, Kostas Varympopiotis
Art Director: Ivelina Mineva
Production companies: Abraxas Film (Bulgaria), Graal Films (Greece)
Sales: Cercamon
Venue: Sarajevo (Adriatic Audience Award)
In Bulgarian
95 minutes