As the Sarajevo Film Festival gears up to welcome the international film community back to the Bosnian capital, its upcoming edition looks set to once again put Southeast European cinema firmly in the spotlight as it unites established filmmakers with regional talent. 

The festival kicks off on Friday (August 14) with Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, which had its world premiere In Competition in Cannes earlier this year. The Polish helmer is set to personally welcome audiences at the gala screening, marking his return to Sarajevo after screening Cold War at the festival and his 1992 documentary film Serbian Epics, which screened in the early days of the festival. 

“The film is particularly relevant to Sarajevo because it deals with historical fiction but also, at the same time, it tells us a lot about where we are today as a continent, geopolitically, and also personally, because it’s such a personal family story at the core,” says Festival Director Jovan Marjanović. “I think it’s really going to resonate with the people in Sarajevo.” 

The festival will close with a restored version of Bosnian helmer Danis Tanović’s 2001 debut feature No Man’s Land on August 21. A total of 51 films will screen across Sarajevo’s four competition sections – narrative feature film, feature and short documentary film, narrative short film and student short film. There are 21 world premieres, six international premieres, one European premiere and 23 regional premieres. 

The competition lineup has a strong number of female filmmakers in selection this year, including the world premiere of Slovenian helmer Urša Menart’s Everything That’s Wrong With You and the European premiere of Macedonian filmmaker Dina Duma’s Skateboarding Is Not For Girls. 

“I feel like there’s great parity this year between female and male filmmakers with their films in competition and that’s very encouraging,” says Marjanović, adding that the festival has been working with its sponsor Uniqa Insurance Group on a female filmmakers support program, which is currently in its second year. 

He adds that the competition strand is largely reflective of “the variety of regional cinema on all fronts.” 

“It’s quite vibrant,” Marjanović says. “I think the topics are varied but they mostly deal with individuals not fitting in with the changing society. I feel like that’s a bit of a threat.”

He continues: “I feel our competition titles are mostly trying to decipher our societies and where they might be going and analyze them from the point of view of the individual. They deal with the past – some of them are family traumas – but there are also some forward-thinking and genre-bending perspective.” 

On the international side, Marjanović says that while there has been a lot of new cinema in the ether, “it hasn’t been an exceptional year when I think about it in terms of international auteur cinema, but it has been a very stable one.” 

“We’re bringing a lot of good, big filmmaking names to Sarajevo, so it’s good to have names that people recognize and are following.” 

In addition to Pawlikowski, the festival is welcoming a raft of top talent including Emily Watson, who is heading up the competition jury, Woody Harrelson, Diego Luna and Asghar Farhadi, all of whom will participate in masterclasses at the festival. 

“We’re obviously ambitious in that sense but celebrity is not our strategy,” he says. “Our ambition is to have people who are not only amazing at what they do, but to also create meaningful relationships with major filmmakers. I think the festival has managed to develop this over the years.” 

Indeed, the starry lineup is reflective of the festival’s long game. Watson returns after 20 years to the festival – her film Breaking the Waves played at the fest’s second edition, making it the first “official” film to win an award while two-time Oscar winner Farhadi presided the jury in 2018. Pawlikowski is a repeat attendee while Harrelson’s Triangle of Sadness, which Marjanović and former Sarajevo festival director Mirsad Purivatra co-produced, opened the 2022 edition. 

“The talks with Woody to arrive in Sarajevo have been going on for years and now it’s worked out,” he says. 

This year, SFF is launching a new program dedicated to the legacy of the late Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr. The long-term initiative, dubbed the Béla Tarr in Sarajevo Tribute program, will focus on the work of the filmmaker’s former students from the Film Factory in Sarajevo, an innovative educational initiative set up by Tarr in 2013. 

The lineup includes Valdimar Jóhannsson’s Lamb, which won Un Certain Regard’s Prize of Originality in Cannes, Pilar Palomero’s Motherhood, and Bianca Lucas’ Love Dog. “These filmmakers really came into the world of cinema with a bang,” says Marjanović. “It’s great to have them back together in Sarajevo and I feel that it’s a really special way to pay respect to Béla and his work by focusing on what he did and how his legacy lives on through their work nowadays.” 

This year, the festival has created the Prix Cineplexx award, an audience award for the best film in its Open Air Premiere program, which showcases new works from across the former Yugoslavia. The winning film’s producer will receive a €20,000 prize, of which €15,000 goes towards services in a marketing campaign in Cineplexx cinemas and €5,000 in cash. 

Marjanović points to an uptick in local productions that have become box office hits in the region, notably Croatian-Serbian co-production The Wedding, which had more than two million admissions in former Yugoslavia, and Bosnian title Testament, which took around 500,000 admissions in Bosnia. “These results complimented and reaffirmed the idea that while, at our core, we are focused on auteur cinema from this part of the world, we can also help on the commercial side of regional cinema and be a platform for distribution.”  

It’s difficult to untangle the Sarajevo Film Festival from its origins, which saw it emerge from a city under siege in 1995 during the Siege of Sarajevo in the Bosnian war and Marjanović maintains its history is what makes the event so unique and resilient. 

“Sarajevo is a festival that has a very clear reason to exist,” he says. “Its ethos has been built on its origins story, and the fact that it started during the Siege of Sarajevo in subhuman conditions is significant. The festival doesn’t need to show only films about war or talk about the war, but what was realized back then is that when times are like that – brutal such as war is – art becomes essential. It brings humanity back and that is what we learn from that: Culture is essential. It’s as essential as food, water and electricity because people get dignity through communication and the arts and that is something we keep in mind when we are putting a program together.” 

The Sarajevo Film Festival takes place August 14-21, 2026.