Sarajevo, As Told By Other People: The 31st Sarajevo Film Festival

Every so often it becomes necessary to rewatch this iconic bit from Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, “Where is Balkan?”, a lighthearted reminder of just how relative our (royal “we”) perception of provincialism really is. After just a few days in the Bosnian capital, it quickly became clear to me that Sarajevo, both the city and the film festival, also has a reputation bestowed upon it. The remaining bullet-holed buildings and metalworked souvenirs (pens and other trinkets made from “spent” bullet casings) were most of what I remembered of the Bosnian capital when I visited with my parents over seven years ago on my first trip to the Balkans. Since then, I’ve had the privilege of visiting nearly every country on the peninsula, and can now call several friends from the region amongst my closest. “Maybe the real Balkans are the friends we all made along the way,” reads the top comment on the Žižek YouTube video. They’re probably right.

In the same vein, it feels like an impossible task to capture my experience of the 31st Sarajevo Film Festival as an isolated journey from my single outsider’s lens. As such, I made it my goal to take in how those around me perceived the festival; this report is structured to heavily integrate conversations and anecdotes with others. My job was simply to make sure everyone ordered kajmak with their ćevapi, just like my Slovenian friends instructed me to do two years ago. Hey – it’s called Balkan hospitality.

The City of History

On a festival-organised bus tour, the guide explained that there were three “important events” in the history of Sarajevo: the June 1914 assassination of Austro-Hungarian heir Franz Ferdinand, the city’s hosting of the 1984 Winter Olympics, and the nearly four-year Siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War from 1992 to 1996. A quick Google search confirms that these three events make up the city’s History with a capital H, rehashed with varying degrees of excitement, solemnity, or commemoration based on the type of tour. A fellow critic and friend of mine told me he was convinced Jesse Eisenberg’s own attendance of the very same tour (which included a visit to Sarajevo’s Tunnel of Hope, built during the siege) must have inspired parts of his directorial debut feature, A Real Pain (2024). It was a cinematically fitting meta-turn of events I took in with great faith, even if only to make this retconned tale more interesting.

The Sarajevo Film Festival can make the bold, astonishing claim-to-fame that it was first hosted in 1995 – during the siege – as an event of hope and resistance, another point proudly noted by the tour guide. This year, beyond the large selection of films touching upon other aspects of pan-Balkan history and culture – migration and diaspora, changing views on sexuality, and rural life, amongst others – it seemed to be straining for a certain triumphal history. The festival screened Ryan Sidhoo’s coming-of-age documentary The Track (2024), a warm underdog tale of three young men and their coach seeking to restore the former glory of the city’s famous bobsleigh and luge track, located on the nearby mountain of Trebević. Visitors are almost always recommended to take the cable car – or, for the outdoorsy, to hike – up to Trebević for the views and to explore the semi-dilapidated Olympics track. Although I did not have enough time to go up myself, the festival’s programme revealed itself to be a choose-your-own-adventure of so-called cultural and touristic engagement.

Tarik Hodžić’s Bosanski vitez (Bosnian Knight, 2025) also appeared to be striving to champion similarly exultant narratives, albeit in a vastly different way. In a move that almost seems to explode the provincialist impulse of the word ‘Balkan’ – as elucidated by Žižek – Hodžić’s documentary takes its Bosnian subject, Sead Delić, to Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, and Turkey to locate what the film coins as traces of Bosnian culture. We and Delić discover that, in many instances, it is by way of religio-cultural transit under the Ottoman Empire that we encounter similarities in names, cuisine, architecture, and more. Strange as it might be, the film also draws an early analogy between the Bosnian people and the indigenous people of the Americas in terms of the effort to survive at all costs through various periods of imperialism and colonisation.

The film’s title comes from Delić’s interest in cosplaying as a medieval Bosnian knight and bringing back a healthy sense of chivalry – which, in the broader context of the film, feels ultimately quite endearing, never mind what other non-chivalrous things medieval knights might have been engaged in. Yet the film is also shot like a slicked-back advertisement, with all the cinematographic grace of a car commercial, the camera swooping down on Delić as if he’s just run an ultramarathon at every turn.

With these choices together, Bosnian Knight teeters on the edge of a populist impulse, even as it actively engages with Delić’s own pursuit to prove his patriotism rather than an exclusionary sense of ethnonationalism. To Hodžić’s credit, the film’s cinematic presentation makes complete sense, even if it pushes the line a bit too far. Its visual style is meant to turn the “History” of Bosnia on its head, divorcing it from dreary, emotionally grey narratives of trauma and loss, a literal and metaphorical sepia filter slapped across retellings of Bosnian lore.

Bosnian Knight

Watching Bosnian Knight put me on a journey to better understand how I, as someone with no personal ties to the region, might be unconsciously overcompensating for this lack of connection. An off-handed comment by two Balkan colleagues on the way to a festival party revealed to me why I ended up being assigned to review Bosnian Knight for a different publication. Fearing yet another uninspired rehashing, at best, or trauma porn, at worst, they simply felt too jaded to write on yet another documentary that looked like it could touch on the genocide in Srebrenica in 1995 – leaving it to me, notably disconnected from any such history. There was a spike of irony in this moment, given what I saw as the importance of being able to contextualise such a complex and tragic moment in the region. But these were the same colleagues who had moved away from their non-EU home countries in the Balkans to EU countries still in the Balkans, for one personal reason or another. They were the same respected colleagues I knew who came to Sarajevo to see friends and have an enjoyable time, not to belabour or exoticise tragedy for an external gaze. They’ve already heard it too many times over.

The City of Brands

Banners of sponsors line the main roads along Baščaršija – the old bazaar – near the river, while meeting areas are plastered with, most notably, Coca-Cola logos. This year, four of the festival’s open-air venues were named after its sponsors: Coca-Cola Open Air Cinema (beverages), BH Telecom Open Air Cinema (telecommunications), UNIQA Open Air Cinema (insurance), and Bingo Open Air Cinema (Bosnia’s largest supermarket chain) at the satellite location in Tuzla. The noticeability of the multi-sponsor environment only felt out of place when it didn’t seem like a more luxury-value item catered to the VIPs, such as drink lounges accessible only by special pass, so prominent in bigger, A-list festivals. In Sarajevo, anyone could enjoy a soft drink at one of the festival’s meeting points. Two fridges consistently stocked full of cans of flavoured, non-alcoholic Somersby cider lay open for passerby to take for free, right next to one of the festival’s largest hotels.

The constant contradiction of accessibility became one of the most curious parts of the festival. I ended up attending two screenings at the Coca-Cola Open Air Cinema, which served as tribute screenings to Stellan Skarsgård and Paolo Sorrentino. (“I look forward to opening a good Italian restaurant in Sarajevo,” said Sorrentino, half-joking, half-serious, at his awards presentation.) At the press info desk the day before, I had persuaded my way into a ticket for Sorrentino’s iconic film, La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty, 2013). The process for press to obtain a ticket is complex and in-person only, something many of my colleagues bemoaned, perhaps a bit dramatically, as Kafkaesque. However, the controlled chaos of it all became a synecdoche for what most festival guests were experiencing: informality is king.

A local friend confirmed a few days before the festival that many of the screenings were sold out—good news for the festival on paper. Yet many screenings, like the open-air screening of Sentimental Value (2025), had swaths of empty seats, as evidenced by a drone shot over the cinema, and the box office was unable to keep up with the demand for tickets by walk-ups, the primary way to purchase them. Upon chatting with a few newfound critic friends from Sarajevo, they confirmed that accessibility at the festival wasn’t so much a question of expensive tickets: the cheapest sell for roughly 3.60 AUD, and the highest, for the festival’s special screenings, for 22.60 AUD, averaging around 7.20-9.00 AUD per ticket. Rather, access comes down to finagling your way into a screening, even as you’re told that screenings are “very full” or likely sold out, and without any certainty as to where the tickets actually are. If my local colleagues were told there weren’t any tickets, for instance, they would keep asking until someone told them something else – they knew how to negotiate their way in.

The Great Beauty

It became clear that I had to surrender to my fate and to the festival’s atmosphere; instead of packing my schedule to the brim, I decided to do plenty of walking around. I had planned to attend the festival last year, encouraged by a Croatia-based Serbian colleague, who told me that Sarajevo during the festival is a sight to behold because the entire city turns into a party. I experienced this firsthand every evening. One of the city centre’s main roads and oldest streets, Zelenih Beretki (meaning “green berets”), is now outfitted with bars and clubs; what appeared to be predominantly heterosexual couples – or otherwise singles ready to mingle – were dressed to the nines, drinking and talking in swarms on either side of the road. The booming of the bar speakers made me feel as though I had been transported directly into a scene from The Great Beauty; it was fitting, of course, to have this year’s edition feature a retrospective of the Italian filmmaker.

The City of Juxtapositions

After I received my press accreditation, a Belgian friend of mine asked where in the city I would be staying. “Ah, Hotel Holiday,” she noted. “Don’t you know the history of the building?” I admitted I didn’t. I rapidly learned that Hotel Holiday – then a branch of Holiday Inn, the US mid-scale hotel chain perhaps most familiar to middle-class Midwestern families – was the home for countless journalists during the Siege of Sarajevo, able to venture down the road (“Sniper Alley”, per the moniker reported in news outlets) to the radio and television building. Upon entering the lobby, it’s easy to imagine the hotel in all of its former glory; now, it feels somewhat like a ghost of its old self: dark and without the active bustle of many guests, but nonetheless fascinating. To imagine war reporters 30 years ago residing in that very same building felt odd: our present-day journalistic endeavour seemed to pale in comparison. For me, as grateful as I was to be present, I felt like I didn’t deserve to be there as a writer. For the city, the presence of countless film and culture press was maybe a form of restoration. Sarajevo is clearly proud of its festival.

However, transformation and a refusal to heed to binaries seems to be baked into the DNA of the festival, also evidenced by the different themes within Balkan cinema that populated the programme. For example, several films by women directors tackled the coming-of-age genre to tear out its conventional tropes, abiding neither by expectations around compulsory heterosexuality nor a battle between tradition and modernity. Kukla’s Fantasy (2025) was one such luminous example, a film that – though set in Slovenia – nonetheless intends to illustrate a sort of multi-ethnic, pan-Balkan experience of family, conservative values, and change in a new generation. Loosely based on her Clermont-Ferrand-winning short film Sestre (Sisters, 2021), Fantasy is a coming-of-age tale that follows three tomboyish young women and best friends as they encounter the eponymous trans woman who quickly becomes an important person in their lives. Fantasy unlocks a whole new version of reality beyond the confines of their so-called traditional existence. But in creating this character, Kukla draws from the ancient and patriarchally-driven gender role of the sworn virgin – a woman bound by a vow of celibacy who chooses to spend her life as a man, a practice still present in rural parts of Albania, Kosovo, and Montenegro – by turning it on its head and using it to explore the future of social norms.

Fantasy

A film with a similar impulse was Urska Djukić’s Kaj ti je deklica (Little Trouble Girls, 2025), now selected as Slovenia’s entry for the Oscars and one of the festival’s highest-profile Balkan works. Djukić examines one teen girl’s twinned religious and sexual awakening over a three-day choir intensive at a convent in northeastern Italy. The filmmaker has spoken openly about the story being highly personal to her, drawing also from what she describes as the power of female voices to create an enchanting choral score. Djukić proudly refuses any sort of resolution or moral affirmation to any of the multiple sides of this story. Our Little Trouble Girls protagonist, Lucija (Jara Sofija Ostan), is pulled heavily toward fulfiling her sexual desires on her own while, at the same time, in true awe of a sort of religious sublime that lies around her and channels desire into a different form: a devotion to God. We are often forced to choose between two opposing poles, Djukić seems to say, but why must we? Why must we abide by certain ideals of what we are told is right and wrong?

“Sarajevo is my favourite city in the world,” one of my Slovenian friends has always said. This remained true after she spent one summer in the Bosnian capital assisting with research on war crimes in the region. A year after we last saw each other, we met again during the festival days at Sarajevo’s historic Morića Han inn and coffee house. I politely turned down her offer to attend a rave out in one of the city’s western neighbourhoods. At Morića Han, she showed up with a friend in matching oversized t-shirts sporting some sort of design with an embedded Palestinian flag. I asked her where it was from. “That party I invited you to yesterday, of course,” she replied without missing a beat. “It was also a fundraiser and demonstration.” Based on what I had learned about the festival’s origins, it seemed that a dastardly celebration of life and true outrage around devastating conflict are never in contradiction in Sarajevo.

Sarajevo Film Festival
15 – 22 August 2025
https://www.sff.ba/en