Headed by veteran US writer-director Paul Schrader, the main festival jury mostly celebrated films from the wider Southeast European region this year. The Heart of Sarajevo prize for Best Picture went to Romanian director Emanuel Pârvu’s Three Kilometers to the End of the World, a piercing drama about the aftermath of a homophobic attack in a small Danube town, which previously premiered in Cannes. The Best Director prize went to Greece’s Yorgos Zois for his stylish fantasy crime thriller Arcadia, which first screened in the Berlinale. Voted Best Actress was Anab Ahmed Ibrahim for Mo Harawe’s The Village Next to Paradise, the first Somalian film ever to compete in Cannes, while Doru Bem won Best Actor for his performance in Andrei Cohn’s Holy Week, a powerful indictment of antisemitism in 19th century Romania.

Meanwhile, the big prize-winner from Sarajevo’s strong shorts program was Kosovan director Norika Sefa’s Like a Sickly Yellow, which takes a experimental approach to memories of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Another stand-out contender was Nebojša Slijecevic’s Cannes Palme D’Or winner The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent, which recreates a notorious massacre of Bosnian Muslims by Serb forces in 1993. Of course, films which revisit the bloody ethnic wars that tore the former Yugoslavia apart have always been a Sarajevo signature, for obvious reasons. The festival itself was launched in 1995 during the notorious four-year siege of the city, which killed around 14,000 people, including more than 5,000 civilians.

All the same, there was a stronger sense than usual in Sarajevo this year that Balkan cinema is finally shaking off the burden of its tragic past and embracing a new chapter. In her dreamlike docu-poem At the Door of the House Who Will Come Knocking, for example, Bosnian director Maja Novakovic offered an exquisite meditation on loss, loneliness and landscape. Meanwhile, Slovenian writer-director Sonaj Prosenc’s Family Therapy was a visually ravishing class-war satire with echoes of vintage Michael Haneke, and actor-director Miranda Karanevic explored a middle-aged woman’s feelings of grief and desire in her superbly crafted second feature Mother Mara, which world premiered out of competition as the festival’s closing gala.

All these films could play to a wider global audience beyond Sarajevo – indeed many of them already have – and make just as deep an emotional connection as with local audiences. This is Balkan cinema of rare quality and universal scope, glossy and imaginative and ready to hold its own on the world stage. Through beauty and joy, humour and anger, cinema itself becomes an act of resistance.

Mara (Karanovic herself) is, at the film’s outset, a grieving mother. Her young adult son, Nemanja, has died and she finds herself the centre of attention at his funeral. Far from being a film solely about the processing of grief, or the pain of losing a child, Mother Mara looks to explore the individual behind the stereotype – to challenge perceptions both of middle-aged women, and more specifically mothers in a regional and more broadly cultural context. Adapted, in part, from Tanja Sljivar’s play We Are The Ones Our Parents Warned Us About, and anchored by Karanovic’s compelling performance, this feels like a film destined for festivals across the Balkans and beyond.

While there is a universality to the experience that Mara must go through in the film’s opening moments, it is steeped in the conventions of regional custom, where a mourning woman has a precise role to fulfil. Mara, on the other hand, is not one for wailing lamentation, instead allowing her eyes to betray the pain and shock being stowed beneath a downcast but unruffled veneer. This is just one of the tired notions that Karanovic’s script, written with Srdjan Koljevic and Maja Pelevic, seeks to expel. Not least of the others is the idea that a woman’s role in society is fulfilled at the end of motherhood. In this film, Mara’s voyage through her grief of losing her son is entwined with a surprisingly positive one in which she comes to define herself as an autonomous individual, perhaps for the first time.

It is hardly surprising that an actress of Karanovic’s stature is able to deliver a performance of such deftness and depth as this, but it is still a marvel to watch. Right from those early moments she paints a portrait of a woman guarded against emotion, even in the face of being shrilly told she must be cursed by her own mother – to have had her husband leave and now her son die. There is a flicker in Karanovic’s eye, but she maintains her composure.

As we learn more about this highly successful lawyer and beloved mother, we come to understand the requirements that might have led to this more buttoned-down and hard-edged persona, but both her grief and her true personality are bubbling under the surface. Karanovic gives fleeting glimpses – moments of heightened sensation, insights provided by the subtleties of performance rather than the labours of dialogue. Mara is a woman working through a multitude of things, pulling at the different strings of her own life and her son’s, trying to get to some uncertain centre.

Mara’s story sees her becoming involved with the 20-something personal trainer, Milan (Vucic Perovic), who comes to her office for help with a property dispute, claiming that Nemanja had told him that she would be able to help. Unable to refuse a friend of her son’s, Mara begins a professional relationship with Milan which, over the course of the film develops into something sexual – another element that sees Mara on a path of personal discovery that is tied to the way she is processing her grief. Indeed, it is possible that Milan’s youthful frankness might be just what Mara needs to dislodge the tears she is evidently so determined to keep from falling.

Karanovic’s filmmaking does a good job of echoing the eddies of Mara’s journey. For much of the time things are classically arranged, frames are as uncluttered and sharply composed as Mara’s glassy, minimalist home. Cinematographer Igor Marovic presents the protagonist and her setting in appropriately cool hues and the editing is slick and un-invasive. There are a few moments when things begin to unwind slightly – a recurring dream sequence in which Mara reckons with finding Namanja’s body, a trip to the night club he visited before he died, including a somewhat cathartic dancefloor sequence. These scenes don’t send Mara spiralling but further reinforce the inner life straining to get out. Mother Mara is all about the character letting go of someone else but also of finding her true self along the way.

Director, screenplay: Mirjana Karanovic
Cast: Mirjana Karanovic, Vucic Perovic, Boris Isakovic, Jasna Zalica
Producer: Snezana van Houwelingen
Screenplay: Mirjana Karanovic, Srdjan Koljevic, Maja Pelevic
Cinematography: Igor Marovic
Editing: Lazar Predojev
Sound: Julij Zornik
Music: Ephrem Luchinger
Production design: Dragana Bacovic
Production companies: This And That Productions (Serbia)
International Sales: Antipode
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Competition Programme – Feature Film, out of competition)
In Serbian
101 minutes

Toxic has been described, among other things, as a horror story, and the opening scene, where one of two protagonists gets bullied in a locker room, has echoes of Brian De Palma’s Carrie. Was that an influence? “It’s funny,”Bliuvaite says, “I went to check my film’s IMDb page the other day, and the ‘horror’ tag is quite prominent. And yes, I definitely wanted to create a dark, creepy atmosphere.”

As for Carrie, the answer is a mixture of ‘yes’ and ‘no’. “I’ve seen it, but I was 15 at the time, so I don’t remember it very well”, she explains. “But my father was a huge Stephen King fan, we had all the books at home, and all the movies based on the books, so I read and watched them all. I’m sure that influenced my style now that I think of it.”

It’s been six days since Toxic took Locarno by storm and won two major prizes – the Golden Leopard and the Best First Feature Award. Bliuvaite is still processing the whole thing: “I’m overwhelmed. I never expected to win the main prize. It’s a huge honor, but at the same time it’s a lot of pressure for whatever I do next. So I have ambivalent feelings about it. Hopefully the attention will dissipate in the weeks to come.”

Nevertheless, she enjoyed sharing the film with the Swiss audience, and looks back on the premiere fondly. “When I arrived in Locarno”, she tells us, “I asked how big the venue was, and they told me the FEVI [where the International Competition premieres take place] has 2,000 seats. They also said the screenings are usually only half full. Then, on the day, Mathilde [Henrot, one of the festival programmers] told me it was sold out.” What was the audience reaction like? “It was interesting to study that, because there was no response to scenes I thought would generate strong reactions, and vice versa.”

It was a big year for Lithuanian cinema at the festival, because Drowning Dry, also in the main competition, won two major awards as well – Best Performance, which went to all four of the lead actors, and Best Director for Laurynas Bareisa. “Yeah, that was crazy. We’ve both been giving so many interviews in Lithuanian media for the past few days. And Laurynas told me about when he went to Venice with his first film, a few years ago. He won an award there, but felt a bit alone. This time, we were both sitting in the front row and sharing this great moment. And no one expected most of the awards to go to one country.”

Is there already an idea for the next film? “There are several. I have various random ideas, but before I commit to one I have to make sure it’s strong enough to make into a feature film, because it’s a very long process.” Did Toxic also start as one of those random ideas? “It did. The first image that came to my mind was that of two young girls walking around in this desolate area. And then I saw a documentary on TV about modeling scouts from Russia visiting these regions. So I put the different pieces together, and that became the film.”

As for what’s next, will it still be a youth-centric story, or perhaps something different? “I don’t know yet, but I don’t want to repeat myself. It wouldn’t be interesting to me, personally, to do something similar again. There are some things from this film I want to continue exploring, others I am done with. There is a sense of continuity in my work, not on the surface level but deeper down, and maybe it will evolve intuitively. I need to figure that out.”

On this day tousle-haired and sensitive teen Simon (Leo Konrad Kuhn) is guided by spontaneous urges and chance events, starting from his whim to slip out of the locker room rather than joining his classmates in the gym. The string of fortuitous coincidences leads him to meet Maria (Alva Schaefer), a girl with green highlights who returns his guarded looks of interest. Surreptitious glances that scrutinise, searching for cues and validation and tentatively feeling out potential connection, form a whole language of their own in Skill Issue, which captures the anxieties of adolescence around how to define oneself or fit into a group, as the river-goers hang out, indulging in smalltalk and joking around. An outlier, only part of the group after running into a former classmate outside school and accepting his casual invitation to tag along, Simon stays distant and on the edge, quietly observing. A mishap and a nosebleed are a catalyst for him and Maria to split off to take a walk, finding themselves in the midst of wild undergrowth peppered with the domestic urban castoffs of dumped fridges and furniture.

There is a hint of mysticism and dreamlike otherworldliness to this film of play and experimentation, which was shot on 16mm, that sets its mood apart from more conventional coming-of-age cinema. A fascination with light and atmospheric effects leans toward the psychedelic, as the camera glides over tree leaves and reflective water, and an impressive outdoor party scene as day turns to night made up of as much mud as electricity. One of the teens recalls a dream about being a tree in an open field, and these kind of suggestive images remind us that we are in a universe of shape-shifting magic and illusory visions — the world of cinema rather than reality, where anything might and can happen. At one point, a clapperboard even appears within the frame to demarcate an acted scene, in a small film-within-a-film tease; in another moment, kids dressed up like robots inexplicably toddle around. Other hints of the absurd add humour, as when a couple discuss waterparks, totally covered by a towel, like cartoon ghosts at the beach.

Simon and Maria seem far from civilisation as they navigate the wilderness and each other’s facades, diffident and unsure but tentatively getting closer. It’s a form of wilfully getting lost for a short stretch of time that does not preclude multiple selfies, which they later review together, as if connection for this generation must always be digitally framed, mediated and validated. The English-language title (the original, different German one Der Fleck means “the spot”) is suitably elusive and oblique, but points to that uncertainty of youth, where kids are inexperienced in reading each other, or determining what the game of human relationships really is and how to avoid losing.

Director, Screenwriter: Willy Hans
Editing: Willy Hans, Matthias Graatz
Cast: Leo Kuhn, Alva Schäfer, Shadi Eck, Felix Maria Zeppenfeld, Darja Mahotkin, Malene Becker, Charlotte Hovenbitzer, Lasse Stadelmann, Ruby M. Lichtenberg, Sina Genschel, Rumo Wehrli, Matthias Neukirch, Michael Neuenschwander, Valentina Fischli
Producers: Julia Cöllen, Frank Scheuffele, Karsten Krause
Cinematographer: Paul Spengemann
Music: Isolée, Daniel Hobi, Christoph Blawert
Sound: Marco Teufen
Production companies: Fünferfilm, 8horses
Venue: Sarajevo (Kinoscope)
In German
94 minutes

“If you don’t cut straight after a scene and wait, sometimes magic happens — a dog comes by, or there’s a swirl of air. It gives a sense you’re not just watching them but also the city itself. When you’re open to chance, more things like this happen, and the universe gives you surprises. It’s like with documentary — documentarians will understand this,” said Kotetishvili.

Set in Tbilisi’s streets, junkyards and apartments stuffed with peculiar decor, Holy Electricity is a dry-humoured and episodic celebration of life on the margins, where scrabbling together enough to survive on is a constant, all-consuming hustle, but there are moments of everyday poetry in abundance. The planets at the centre of this chaotic and charming cosmos are Bart (Nikolo Ghviniashvili), a trans junk dealer in debt to gangsters, and Gonga (Nika Gongadze), a long-haired music freak, who team up for a door-to-door enterprise selling neon crucifixes.

“Everyone was a non-professional. It’s my first feature and everyone said that would be hard. I was also worried, but it was great I did it like this because it turned out to be not a problem at all and was really pleasant to shoot. If the film carries some energy it is because of these actors,” said Kotetishvili. “I liked and believed in them. If I want something and am very prepared in life it doesn’t work like this anyway, at least in our budget. I tried to let perfectionism go. But it means the editing process is long, because a lot doesn’t go in. It becomes kind of like making a puzzle — chaotic, but structured and leading somewhere.”

After a “really long search” for people with the “right energy” for Bart and Gonga, Nika Gongadze was cast as the younger lead. “He was studying the clarinet in a conservatory and dressing very conservatively, then at night listening to punk rock and drinking with friends, two very different worlds which was already interesting, and he had this energy,” said the director. Koteshvili enlisted Nikolo Ghviniashvili as Bart, integrating his trans identity and headaches over mismatched documents into the character.

Asked if he intended to make a political statement by featuring such a diverse cast of misfits, con-conformists and disenfranchised citizens at a time the Georgian government has introduced highly contentious laws against so-called LGBT “propaganda” that potentially could see films such as Holy Electricity censored, Kotetishvili, who dedicated his Golden Leopard award in Locarno to a Georgian film community currently facing “hard times,” said: “It is just natural for me, that’s how I think. It is my life vision I guess, and many things were intuitive.”

“Bart’s main problem is that he needs money, the same problem that everyone can have,” he continued. “His identity is not in the foreground because I think it’s very normal and we should be taking it like this. The problem is when people refuse to even watch a film full of crosses and with trans people, saying it’s impossible. Actually Bart is religious in real life and goes to church; everything is possible in life.”

Religion, too, is ever-present in the film, but not something Kotetishvili wanted to make a thematic focus. “That reality is there, and I was inspired by this, but I didn’t want to go deep. It is more like a background, because it’s like this in Georgia. It doesn’t matter if you are religious or not, religion is part of your life. These crosses are really there — not the small versions, but the big ones on the street — and they are beautiful actually. If it’s at night and in the mountains, you see them lit up in the air. Of course, many people capitalise on religion, so these guys also do this, but they don’t disrespect it, because actually how they start is by making a cross for Gonga’s father. But I wanted the film, most of all, to be about them,” he said.

The dialogue is recreated in the film, for which Karahoda’s son Miron is both performer and credited co-writer. Sat in a car next to his father (played by Ylber Mehmeti), Miron gives voice to his frustration, even as an adolescent early-teen, about the lack of a future he sees in his own country of Kosovo. Karahoda takes this single conversation and re-contextualises it to form a thoughtful meditation on the challenges facing his country today.

The specific setup is as it was in real life; Miron jumps into the car after football practice and speaks to his father on the way to the airport to collect a gift sent from abroad. Karahoda combines the boy’s lamentations about his friends and coaches moving abroad, and his dream career as a soccer player being a dead-end in his homeland and spins them out using the journey to the airport and an absurdist stop-off at a customs office to collect a parcel. He uses these elements to engage in a broader commentary on a state system that lets down its people, leading to their apparently inevitable departure – a brain and talent drain.

This is emphasised by the film’s visual composition, which sees the camera looking through the windows and windscreen – either into or out of the car – for the majority of the film’s running time. The ‘on the way’ of the title at first seems to reference a line of dialogue, but evidently it becomes about transition and migration, the two characters en route, taking a trip, increasingly unsure of exactly where their lives are going to end up, but together, nonetheless.

Director, cinematography: Samir Karahoda
Cast: Ylber Mehmeti, Miron Karahoda
Producers: Eroll Bilibani, Samir Karahoda
Screenplay: Samir Karahoda, Miron Karahoda
Editing: Enis Saraci
Sound: Labinot Sponca
Art Direction: Leonora Mehmeti
Production Company: SK Films (Kosovo)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Competition Programme – Short Film)
In Albanian
15 minutes

Maja met Blaz Murn while the two were students and they immediately hit it off. Blaz was super cool; he was estranged from his father and so had a sense of freedom and self-determination that Maja was captivated by. Soon they were off making films together until, one morning in 2017, Blaz collapsed. He was quickly diagnosed with acute leukemia and began immediate chemotherapy and their life and their love would never be the same again. The impact of Blaz’s illness on their relationship sits at the heart of Cent’anni, a film about what it means to go through something so harrowing together and apart. It is a film so intimate and personal, that it is frankly miraculous that Prelog has managed to produce something as self-reflective and clear-eyed as she has.

The period outlined above – the couple’s relationship before and during Blaz’s illness – is presented through a compilation of archival footage. Families gather, Maja ad Blaz smile, then hospitals begin to appear more regularly, with convalescence and recovery taking centre stage. Despite the inherent drama of their story, it is not this that Cent’anni is about, but Blaz’s resolve to cycle his own version of the Giro d’Italia, from the Dolomites to Mount Etna, to prove himself robust and healthy and capable of living for 100 years (hence the title). He asks Maja to accompany him and to make a film of his feat. He wants something quiet and measured – to embody his will and determination more than playing his recent life as spectacle.

Prelog duly obliges, crafting a document of his journey that manages to be both stirring and modest. The camera observes Blaz from the back of a van as he makes his way up steep inclines or freewheels his way back down them. His trip across the majestic Italian countryside is beautifully presented by the camerawork of Lev Predan Kowarski, who shot the film alongside Prelog. The Giro is one of the three Grand Tours, and its grandeur seems to only be elevated by the context of Blaz’s mission – one of inner healing and transformation. However, an expedition that was intended to be a celebratory becomes anything but as Maja and Blaz’s relationship is put to the test across the course of their time on the road.

While keen to capture the simple accomplishment of what Blaz is doing, Prelog is never afraid to leave the camera rolling – or have it turned upon herself – to probe at the regular emotional collisions that occur during their pitstops. Maja gave up a lot to support Blaz through his illness and evidently, at times, feels that her partner is harshly dismissive of her experience. For his part, Blaz’s anger at what he has been through, and his frustration at those who are not – and never will be – able to truly understand his perspective is palpable. The pair regularly clash, Blaz often feeling that the film crew is at once lacking in empathy and also derailing this almost spiritual quest.

Naturally, all of this is framed through Prelog’s lens and her thoughtful voiceover adds a further layer of her viewpoint on the events, but it is an impressively level eye that she casts. As their relationship not only enters choppy waters but actively feels as though it is beginning to disintegrate, Prelog tries to remain true both to both her subject and herself. She allows Blaz the space to vent at her, often taking his ire without a word of rebuke, while never shying away from the camera turning on her afterwards to record her private reaction. Likewise, she also voices some of her own frustrations to Blaz, and in turn allows the opportunity to see his remorse after a stinging attack.

All of this is difficult and painful to watch, but it is delicately pulled together by Prelog and her editor Uros Maksimovic so as to never lean in favour of one side. What might put some viewers off is its – arguable – sense that after what they had been through together, the people they used to be and the love they shared could never have survived. Regardless, Cent’anni is a moving and thought-provoking insight into a process of shared recovery and what emerging from that means for all parties.

Director: Maja Doroteja Prelog
Cast: Maja Doroteja Prelog,Blaz Murn, Maja Murn
Producers: Rok Bicek, Alessandro Leone (III), Massimo Casula, Marta Leone, Biljana Tutorov
Screenplay: Maja Doroteja Prelog, Blaz Murn
Cinematography: Maja Doroteja Prelog, Lev Predan Kowarski
Editing: Uros Maksimovic
Production Design: Blaz Murn
Sound: Julij Zornik, Riccardo Spagnol
Music: Sebastian Zawadzki
Productions Companies: Cvinger Film (Slovenia), Agresywna Banda (Poland), Zena Films (Italy), Wake Up Films (Serbia), Zwinger Film (Austria)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Competition Programme – Documentary Film)
In Slovenian, Italian
90 minutes

Unlike most Balkan comedies, When Santa Was a Communist feels understated and universal enough to play outside the region, wrapping its idealistic message about multicultural unity in sparkly festive layers of irony. The plot is loosely inspired by an ongoing culture war dating back to wartime, when hardline Catholic and Muslim leaders tried to ban the traditional New Year visit by Santa Claus to schools and kindergartens across the region, even though it began as a non-religious communal winter custom in Communist Yugoslavia. Anti-Santa ban proposals and pro-Santa protests have resurfaced several times since.

Mirvad Kuric stars as Burhan, the manager of a ramshackle low-budget theatre troupe travelling through the backwater towns of present-day Bosnia in late December to perform a Santa-themed children’s show at schools and community halls. The festive starring role goes to Jerry (Mirza Tanovic), a formerly famous screen star fallen on hard times, who is flanked by younger actress Selma (Zana Marjanovic) and musician Zoka (Miraj Grbic). Along for the ride is American NGO observer Ella (Croatian-American Kristen Winters), monitoring the mission to make sure it remains a box-ticking exercise in carefully neutral cross-cultural unity.

Spreading a harmless message of seasonal good cheer, Burhan and his travelling players are greeted by delighted children wherever they stop. Adults and community leaders, by contrast, mostly give them a frosty welcome. The group’s first planned performance is blocked by racist Croatian Catholic nationalists, who claim the show features a “Muslim dressed a a Communist saint”. Their next is sabotaged by imams and Muslim elders, who complain “this is a political play about a Catholic saint.”

This Catch-22 farce takes an extra surreal road-movie detour when the group cross paths with a gun-toting gangster, Merdzo (Goran Kostic), who turns out to be fan of Jerry’s work, inviting the whole ensemble to his daughter’s wedding feast. Only by Merdzo pulling a few strings do they finally get to perform their Santa show to a culturally mixed audience in an otherwise religiously segregated school. But even here, the ghosts of the past crash the party and sour the festive mood.

When Santa Was a Communist is a local story on one level, but witty and well-observed enough to still translate internationally. While some of humour is culturally specific, much of it all will make sense to wider audiences: sarcastic jokes about ruined buildings being “national monuments”, or entire villages relocating to find work in Germany, or the need for Bosnians to dutifully play the role of peaceful good neighbours to please overseas observers. “When foreigners start apologising, we know it’s something to do with the war,” Burhan shrugs.

Kapetanovic sometimes plays the story a little too deadpan, especially the inflammatory climax, which lacks the show-stopping dramatic force it deserves. That said, his sardonic tone is mostly well-judged while the cast are generally excellent, especially the anchoring presence of Kuric. With his hangdog, soulful, world-weary aura, he comes across like a Balkan cousin of Brendan Gleeson. Music is also richly deployed, from ironically patriotic punk songs to Bosnian translations of vintage Christmas classics. The film’s Bosnian title is slightly different from the English, translating simply as “Santa Claus in Bosnia”. Perhaps significantly, it uses the distinct term for Santa favoured by Bosnian Muslims, which translates as “Grandfather Frost”.

Director: Emir Kapetanovic
Cast: Mirvad Kuric, Zana Marjanovic, Miraj Grbic, Mirza Tanovic, Kristen Winters
Screenplay: Emir Kapetanovic, Vahid Durakovic
Cinematography: Mikša Andelic
Editing: Saša Peševski
Music: Adis Sirbubalo
Producers: Emir Kapetanovic, Jasmin Durakovic, Bogdan Petkovic, Natalija Rudic, Slaven Knezovic, Daliborka Puž, Jovan Todorovic, Džemal Šabic
Production companies: DEPO Production (Bosnia), Emote Films (Serbia), Eurofilm (Croatia), Federalna televizija (Bosnia), CKA Charlama (Bosnia)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Fetsival (Open Air)
In Bosnian, Croatian, English
86 minutes

“As you can see, I’m a very inhibited actor,” Turturro joked, as clips were shown that revisited the wild energy of some of his performances.

Turturro, speaking of his earliest beginnings, said that he had watched American movie classics a lot with his parents, whose reaction was always “very visceral.” Their animated responses later extended to his own premieres, where his father, seated among celebrities, had been known to smoke in the theatre and shout at the screen.

As a youngster, Turturro had “always fantasised” about being an actor. He didn’t think it was possible without classic star looks until he saw Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy (1969). “I thought, that guy could have been someone in my family. It really blew my mind,” he said.

But, being a “dark, ethnic actor” meant typecasting, and Turturro was typically offered roles as villains and maniacs, though some of those offered complexity and substance, like his role in Five Corners, he said. “If it’s a good character, it’s different than playing a run-of-the-mill psychopathic bad guy. There’a sensitivity to John [Patrick Shanley]’s writing.” Not that audiences minded seeing him as a murderer. “People were more upset that I killed a penguin than my mother in that,” he laughed.

A degree of industry attention enabled him to connect with directors he had a real affinity with, and a wider range of roles opened up to him — though weirdos have remained a joy to play.

He shared comparable origins with Spike Lee, who directed him in Do the Right Thing not long after Five Corners. “I grew up in a black neighbourhood in Queens, he grew up in an Italian neighbourhood, and we were almost the same age,” he said of their fortuitous meeting. It was with the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, who he met through fellow Yale Drama School student Frances McDormand, that Turturro forged his most prolific and fruitful collaborative relationship.

He described an atmosphere of freedom and fun on the Coens’ sets, where his comedic experimentation enjoyed free rein, leading to some of his most famous scenes, like the dance of perverted bowler Jesus Quintana in The Big Lebowski. “It was more of a first grade kind of thing where you’re trying to make your friends laugh, I didn’t think they’d put it in the film,” he said.

Turturro described dipping into blockbuster roles in more recent years with the Transformers franchise: “I enjoyed it. I call it my electrical job. Normally what I do is plumbing. There’s more of a sketchlike approach, than a detailed painting, but it’s like playing with your kids.” He wound up director Michael Bay by not taking them seriously enough, as they are “based on a toy,” he laughed.

Turturro, when asked about the television series Monk, where he played a man with agoraphobia, spoke of the need for cinematic stories that depict, with humanity, the reality of life with mental health struggles — a subject he is familiar with in his own family.

“I was the guardian of my older brother, who was schizophrenic and was very smart and perceptive,” he said. “Movies about mental health usually talk about the exception, when people get better, not the journey of how people have to navigate the labyrinth of the mental health system, and the cost it has. I know how difficult and lonely it is. Those are the stories that are harder to tell, but actually point to people on the street.”

“A person who has problems is a full, complex human being. They have desire, lust, ambition, cruelty, they can be really funny, and full of surprise, and it’s a bear to get your hands around. John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence is a film I really love, because it still has love in the film, even though the husband is telling his wife to just act normal,” he said.

“Once my brother told me, you get a lot of material from me. He isn’t wrong,” he added.

Asked for advice for young actors, he spoke of the emotional flexibility the profession requires. “You have to have a thick skin and a thin skin, that’s the problem,” he said.

An unnamed protagonist (played by Jaroslav Pizl) works at a nuclear power plant and has a fixed idea about how much electrical energy should be enough for a human being to live with a reasonable quality of life. Using this figure, he estimates an overall total that he is allowed to consume across his lifetime of 228 MWh – around 3 MWh per year. In his early 60s, he approaches the end of his allotted consumption and must prepare for his body to begin returning energy back into the world.

From a screenplay by Josef Kokta, Kochova’s film is a low-key and poetic look at the final days of the protagonist’s life, as he must decide on how to use his remaining energy  based on his own pre-determined maximum limit. Shot on beautiful 16mm stock by Kristina Kulova, and including some elements in which electrical discharges based on Pizl’s voice have been used to degrade the film images, 3MWh once feels separated from its subject and of a piece with it.

The reasons for the protagonist’s worldview are left enigmatic beyond a fundamental adherence to the first law of thermodynamics in which energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. However, the film raises pointed questions about the consumption of resources by modern society, and in a poignant, somewhat grim, portrait, explores what might happen were an individual to try to redress the imbalance in some small way. As the annual figures for various countries in Europe are listed in voiceover, all more than twice the man’s estimate for comfort, his perspective seems understandable even while it is completely alien. Kochova’s film find the deeply humane in this most mathematical of equations.

Director: Marie-Magdalena Kochova
Cast: Jaroslav Pizl
Producers: Agata Kolarova, Eva Flidrova
Screenplay: Josef Kokta
Cinematography: Kristina Kulova
Editing: Veronika Kasparova
Sound: Martin Michalek
Music: Hastal Hapka
Production Company: Helium Film
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (European Shorts)
In Czech
12 minutes

Speaking to a packed masterclass crowd in Sarajevo, Payne also laughed off questions about directors having a singular auteur-like “vision”, stressing that the entire film-making process is a collective, exploratory process born from multiple creative collaborations. With his regular writing partner Jim Taylor also in attendance in the Bosnian capital, the director described their relationship almost like a long-term marriage.

“He makes the coffee, I cook a little,” Payne joked. “It’s pretty harmonious. You have to have that with a creative partner. And I have to say, too, for any film-makers here, the director is rarely alone. The director often has a co-writer. You have a partner in casting, in production design, in cinematography and editing and putting the music on. You always work with someone. And such collaborations have to be ego-less in terms of, you have to feel free to say even stupid ideas and not be made fun of.”

Payne confirmed reports that he and Taylor are currently working on a sequel to their breakthrough hit Election (1999), which is reportedly based on Tom Perrotta’s 2022 novel Tracy Flick Can’t Win, with Reese Witherspoon set to reprise her career-making role as Flick. Having recently been granted joint US-Greek citizenship, the director is also hoping to tap the European film-funding market with future plans for Danish-language and French-language features, but he declined to share details in Sarajevo.

Meanwhile, Payne and Taylor are also working with Hemingson again on a classic American western. “Right now, Jim and I are talking about a sequel to Election,” Payne nodded. “But also with a different writer, the guy who wrote The Holdovers, we are conceiving a western. It would be nice to take a realistic, naturalistic approach to a western and also using landscape. As much as a sense of place is important in the films I do, having an even greater dramatic, archetypal interplay between character and landscape is really interesting.”

Payne caused a ripple of laughter in Sarajevo by confessing he yearns to make more genre-friendly films, notably “a good car chase movie” in the tradition of Peter Yates’ Bullitt (1968), Richard Sarafian’s Vanishing Point (1971) and Henri Verneil’s cult neo-noir heist thriller The Burglars (1971), aka Le Casse. “That’s got a phenomenal car chase,” Payne said. “And Vanishing Point is such a masterpiece… so I want to do a car chase movie, and I’d also like to do a detective movie.”

Asked about his perennial fondness for setting and shooting films in his native Nebraska, Payne bristled a little, insisting that small towns can contain entire worlds. “You can do anything, anywhere,” he told the Sarajevo audience. “Ozu never left Tokyo but he can tell the most universal stories. Not just in the same city, but with the same lens and the same lack of camera movement. William Faulkner basically never left Oxford, Mississippi. Forgive this seemingly sarcastic line, but you don’t ask Martin Scorsese: why do you still shoot in New York? You don’t ask Paul Thomas Anderson: why do you shoot in Los Angeles? Because those are famous places. But when someone’s from Sarajevo, or from Omaha, Nebraska, people ask why you want to shoot there…”

If the collective identity of a people can be stored in physical objects, writings and reproduced images of course figure large — and to confiscate these traces amounts to the wilful erasure of that people’s right to exist, this work powerfully contends. A Fidai Film is Aljafari’s political act of resistance against this method of oppression and the Israeli regime’s attempt to control the narrative of the region. The footage, in a mix of black-and-white and colour, is alive with faces. Crowds bustle down streets alongside horses and carts, in an era before the Nakba of 1948 that displaced around half of Palestine’s predominantly Arab population. In later footage, searches, indignities and armed surveillance by patrolling soldiers is a constant. Visages occasionally appear close-in, their steady gazes burning through the screen right at us, as if declaring that they are here, now and for all time. There are buildings, muddy refugee camps and ruins, too, structures built or demolished and makeshift shelters resorted to as belonging on land is asserted or denied.

The Israeli Ministry of Defence relabelled the previously well-ordered material they looted. Rather than diligently captioning them again, Aljafari has scrubbed out new interpretations and definitions in painterly red on the screen, freeing them from the Israeli government’s co-opted authority over Palestinian reality and leaving them (and us) unmoored from written bearings. Crimson interventions, luminescent like corrosive lava, also alter images, streaking frames like blood on a window, or anonymising soldiers. Playful and audacious in the liberties taken, these animated splashes and stains reveal the vulnerability of representations to tampering and alteration at the hands of whoever claims proprietorship over them. Real blood, too, has been captured in some photographs, pooling under heads or torsos in evidence of atrocities against Arab bodies.

The Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinians and Lebanese Shias followed shortly after the withdrawal of the PLO from Lebanon in 1982, and a haunted air of loss and grief seeps through these frames. It’s assisted by an ambient soundscape, passages from Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani and his recollections of occupation, dislocation and exodus, and looping lines of a child singing a rhyme that refers to two windows in an attic — a home storage space, within sight lines. Aljafari’s surprised messenger exchange with an acquaintance who tells him he has got his hands on some of the looted documents and items runs down the screen at the end, a teasing addendum that hints at the source of this reformulated archival material, and at a kind of underground of resilient truth that will always subvert and show up chinks in official propaganda versions.

Director, Screenwriter, Photography: Kamal Aljafari
Editing: Kamal Aljafari, Yannig Willmann
Producers: Kamal Aljafari, Flavia Mazzarino
Music: Simon Fisher Turner
Production company: Kamal Aljafari Productions
Sales: Kamal Aljafari Productions
Venue: Sarajevo (Doha Film Institute programme)
In English, Arabic and Hebrew
78 minutes

Julie, played by newcomer Tessa Van den Broeck, is a Flemish teen with a knack for tennis: the star player of an elite French-speaking academy, she’s also the teacher’s pet when it comes to the head coach Jérémy (Laurent Caron, whose previous credits include three Dardenne films). Then, one day, tragedy strikes as it’s reported that one Aline, the academy’s former star, has taken her own life.

Soon after, Jérémy is suspended amidst rumors of inappropriate behavior, and all of a sudden all eyes are on Julie who, much like Aline, had a close relationship with the coach and numerous unsupervised encounters with him. Everyone at the academy is invited to testify, with a particular focus on Julie. But the girl stays quiet, per the title, at least on the court: away from prying gazes, she secretly keeps in touch with Jérémy over the phone, refusing to believe, or accept, he could have done anything wrong…

The director, whose short films also deal with various aspects of athletic life, previously touched upon the subject in 2015’s Umpire, and has now expanded the premise into a full-blown feature with the help of co-writer Ruth Becquart, a veteran Belgian actress who also appears in front of the camera as Julie’s mother. Clearly familiar with this world, he depicts it with calculated, yet almost mundane precision, capturing the action in static shots which, paradoxically, accentuate the pained dynamism of the sport.

Key to this approach is also the casting of Van den Broeck, a talented tennis player in real life, whose skill becomes the ideal embodiment of the focus Julie resorts to in order to suppress any and all emotional response to the crisis at hand. Every serve is an anguished denial of everything occurring outside of her tunnel vision, a rejection of a reality that contains multitudes.

Said multitudes are an integral part of the plot structure, which eschews conventional abuse and #MeToo tropes to offer a more nuanced take, with allusion and tiny morsels of information rather than loud declarative sequences, and not just when it comes to the main plot (the implied class disparity between the Flemish-speaking Julie and her French-speaking peers, which adds to the dramatic tension, is all subtext).

The deliberate lack of catharsis, for the viewer and for Julie, is actually the emotional cornerstone of the picture, as Leonardo van Dijl sidesteps clichés to deal with something very raw and very real. Much like the main character, whose every move is designed to excel in a highly competitive domain, he is always in control, carefully designing each shot to illustrate the disconnect at the center of the protagonist’s everyday life, in an artfully devastating portrait of uncomfortable truths and unspoken pain.

Director: Leonardo van Dijl
Screenwriters: Leonardo van Dijl, Ruth Becquart
Cast: Tessa Van den Broeck, Ruth Becquart, Koen De Bouw, Claire Bodson, Laurent Caron
Producers: Gilles De Schryver, Gilles Coulier, Wouter Sap, Roxanne Sarkozi, Delphine Tomson, Luc Dardenne, Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Nima Yousefi
Cinematography: Nicolas Karakatsanis
Production design: Julien Denis
Costume design: Viviane Rapp
Music: Caroline Shaw
Sound: Boris Debackere, Gustaf Berger, Arne Winderickx
Production companies: De Wereldwrede, Les Films du Fleuve, Hobab, Film i Väst
World sales: New Europe Film Sales
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Kinoscope)
In Dutch, French
100 minutes

Filmed in 2018 and 2019, Dad’s Lullaby could be seen as old news or, alternatively, as a prescient and increasingly timely insight into Ukraine’s shattered psyche. Domestic in focus, this is one of the more intimate films to emerge from the ongoing war on Europe’s eastern front. It feels slight and scrappy in places, with a hand-held DIY rawness, and promising hints of Diak’s own story that fizzle out too soon. But as a tender exercise in cinema as family therapy session, it is frequently engaging and insightful. It world premieres this week in competition at Sarajevo Film Festival, where it won the work-in-progress Docu Talent award in 2022.

Shot in classic no-budget hand-held observational style, Dad’s Lullaby instantly plunges viewers into the cramped Kyiv apartment of Serhiy Zinchuk, his wife Nadiia, and their three young sons Nikita, Artem and Sasha. The subject matter here is mostly low-key and domestic: family meals, walks in the park, father-son friction, the routine tensions of five people sharing a small home. But the unseen disruptive energy behind every scene is Serhiy’s recent battlefield experience fighting Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine.

Ever since, Serhiy has struggled to readjust to his normal duties as father and husband. Food has lost all taste, and he craves solitude from his family, feeling increasingly alienated from them despite his obviously warm paternal bond. He is also haunted by the real-life nightmares he witnessed in combat, the bloodlust and casual slaughter, and the existential horror of seeing former comrades blown to pieces. “You come back mentally broken,” he tells Diak, “there is a total mess in your head.”

Shooting sporadically over more than a year, Diak tracks the corrosive effect that Serhiy’s battle-scarred state has on his family: his withdrawn moods, his angry outbursts, his increasingly frosty relationship with Nadiia. When she becomes pregnant with their first daughter, it is an outwardly happy event, but their arguments continue even during the christening. Some kind of serious family fracture becomes inevitable.

Dad’s Lullaby takes an intriguing sideways swerve when Serhiy turns the tables on Dias during their private therapy sessions, picking up the camera to interrogating her feelings and life choices, notably her failed relationship with another soldier, who worked as a medic on the frontline. Amusingly, he also questions her directing decisions, arguing that her footage could equally be edited into a paean to family love or portrait of a domestic tyrant. “We can’t build our lives out of fragments,” he protests. Everyone’s a film critic nowadays.

Under different circumstances, Serhiy could appear controlling and mansplaining in scenes like these. But he is sensitive, self-aware and self-critical enough to give his insights authority. Trained as a psychologist and social worker, he appears to view making this film as a means to try and understand his own fragile mental state. A documentary in which the subject becomes co-director midway through is a thrilling idea, challenging conventional notions of authorial voice or journalistic neutrality. So it is a shame Diak does not pursue this fertile sideline further, digging deeper into the parallels between her emotional scars and Serhiy’s .

Because filming wrapped in 2019, Dad’s Lullaby is only tangentially about the current war in Ukraine. A brief coda during the final credits informs us that, after Russia invaded in 2022, Serhiy returned to the frontline, and is still fighting today. Nadiia and their children have since relocated abroad for their own safety. Likewise Diak, who is now based in Portugal. This is where her film bites hardest, switching from personal to universal: the cycle of trauma depicted here is now a daily reality, for thousands more families just like this one.

Director: Lesia Diak
Cinematography: Lesia Diak, Serhiy Zinchuk
Editing: Andrei Gorgan
Music: Margaryta Kulichova
Producers: Lesia Diak, Monica Lazurean-Gorgan, Elena Martin
Production companies: DramaFree (Ukraine), FilmWays (Romania), Petnaesta Umjetnost (Croatia)
World sales: DramaFree
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Documentary Feature Competition)
In Ukrainian
78 minutes

The historical drama, which is set in the countryside in the late nineteenth century and screened in competition at the Sarajevo Film Festival after its premiere in the Berlinale’s Forum section, is a “free adaptation” of the 1889 novella An Easter Torch by Ion Luca Caragiale. It is less aimed at bearing witness to a specific event than it is intended to set out a general moral treatise about hatred breeding hatred, which is passed on generationally as children imitate the attitudes and behaviour of their parents. It contends that the kind of hatred that can spark murderous acts is something every human is capable of — a meaning elucidated by a surprise twist, in a film which starts with a scene of brutal mob violence against a Jewish woman that sets up a sense of terrible inevitability that this cannot end peacefully. There is nothing fresh or modern about the dour palate or unrushed, relentlessly chronological tread of this story (indeed, this is a cycle of animosity and violence that has been turning for far longer than the advent of cinema), but there is an earthy, blunt rawness to the telling, and an uncompromising lack of sentimentality, that means we are hit at full force by its unvarnished simplicity, and the dread that builds as inter-religious relationships in the village deteriorate.

Leiba (Doru Bem), a gruff Jewish innkeeper, lives on the premises of his business with his wife Sura (Nicoleta Lefter) and their son Eli (Mario Dinu). These are tough times economically, and his local Orthodox regulars are becoming churlish, their growing resentment that he charges for everything he serves them underpinned by antisemitic insinuations of greed, even though he has let them run up debts for prior meals. Racism is tense in the air, and all it takes is a little too much wine before patrons are discussing eugenics, and sharing slurs about Jews, Roma and Turks. This kind of talk is normalised in the village, and Leiba endures it as part of the price of making a living for his family — but an escalating problem with his flighty and malicious employee Gheorghe (an excellent Ciprian Chiriches) becomes the catalyst for a more menacing form of conflict to erupt.

Beautiful long shots of the country landscape only serve to underscore the gnawing sense of desperate hardship and dread. Pastoral harmony is far from the minds of the family at the inn, as they ration candles and conduct wary checks on who might be slinking around in the yard. When Gheorghe is fired after deliberately flouting Jewish rules about keeping food kosher out of spite, he threatens to return for revenge at Easter, a time of Orthodox celebration when the innkeeper’s family are eyed askance as sinful for not following the tradition of dying eggs red (spilt blood, in varying symbolic and literal forms, is an effective thread running through otherwise austere frames.)

The way in which bigotry is fuelled by invented narratives is astutely depicted. Leiba is accused of cheating his customers with sour wine that he improves the taste of through “sorcery.” Blocked from buying supplies, he is tricked and threatened into purchasing low-quality wine, ironically forced into adopting the role he has been falsely assigned. When the gendarmerie refuse to send protection for the family, the local authorities dismissing the pregnant Sura as stuck up and needing a dose of fear to bring her down to size, the stage is more than set for tragedy. They are not the first to endure this prejudice, which their ancestors have little spoken of due to shame, she points out  — and certainly, we are all too aware, they will not be the last.

Director, Screenwriter: Andrei Cohn
Editing: Andrei Iancu, Dana Bunescu
Cast: Doru Bem, Nicoleta Lefter, Ciprian Chiriches, Mario Gheorghe Dinu, Ana Cioneta
Producer: Anca Puiu
Cinematographer: Andrei Butica
Sound Design: Daniel Soare, Petre Osman
Production Design: Cristian Niculescu
Production company: Mandragora
Sales: Shellac
Venue: Sarajevo (Competition)
In Romanian
133 minutes

Fresh from his Academy Awards triumph and huge critical acclaim for his debut feature. American Fiction, Jefferson was in Sarajevo to host a gala screening and masterclass interview. The wide-ranging public conversation covered his career, from music journalist to Emmy-winning TV writer and Oscar-winning film-maker, as well as his working methods, future projects and nuanced approach to addressing sensitive racial issues on screen.

During the masterclass, Jefferson recalled that when he first read the novel that American Fiction is based on, Percival Everett’s Erasure, he was floored by the autobiographical parallels. “No piece of art had ever spoken to me so deeply,” he said. “The more I read it, the more the Venn diagram of me and Monk, the main character, just started to become a circle. There’s so much of me in the film because, truly, I understood this character on a fundamental level. I’ve even started to look like Jeffrey Wright, which is a really scary thing.”

During his screenwriting career, Jefferson has even shared Monk’s frustration as an African-American author whose work is not deemed authentically “black” enough by his mostly white bosses. Indeed, he once received a note from a TV exec asking him make one of his black characters “blacker”. He responded by proposing a personal meeting so the exec could explain what specific racial changes he had in mind. Needless to say, that follow-up never happened. “No, because they knew there would be a civil rights lawsuit,” Jefferson laughed. “I wish it had happened now. I could have made a lot of money.”

The director also stressed the importance of striking the right balance between comedy and tragedy, irony and sincerity in satirical works like American Fiction. When tackling heavy subject matter such as racism, family conflict, bereavement and even slavery, he argues that films which adopt a purely grim tone are simplistic and insulting.

“When I see a movie that just has slaves in absolute, abject misery, unable to find any happiness, that does a disservice to the people who went through those things,” he said. “It makes them seem feeble, it takes away the reality that they were strong people who found ways to survive and found ways to enjoy life. So that was really important to me in making this movie. Yeah, it’s about race and racism, but I also didn’t want to pretend that that ruins my life. You know, it certainly makes my life harder at some points. But I also found lots of ways to enjoy myself and laugh and celebrate.”

Jefferson also dropped a few clues in Sarajevo about his planned follow-up projects to American Fiction, including a contemporary western. “It’s about two brothers who travel throughout the American Southwest looking for their missing third brother,” he said. “It’s got a lot more action than American Fiction, there are twists and turns, it’s kind of noir-ish. So it’s a very different kind of movie from American Fiction while still having some of the same thematic elements.”

As reference points, Jefferson cited Anthony Mann’s iconic run of westerns with James Stewart, but also the Coens classic No Country for Old Men (2007) and the Taylor Sheridan-penned Hell or High Water (2016). Significantly, all films in which landscape is a huge presence, more like an additional main character in the drama.

“I’m from Arizona,” Jefferson explained. “I’ve always thought that it has such unique beauty. Like, there’s nowhere in the world that looks like that. It has these big, weird saguaro cactuses everywhere. You have this dry desert, but there’s also these big mountains everywhere. And the sunsets are incredible. It’s just this tableau that you don’t really get a lot of places. And I was like, why don’t I set something there?”

If the stars align, Jefferson hopes to shoot his western next year. Meanwhile, he is also working on an erotic thriller screenplay, the kind that dominated Hollywood in the 1980s and 1990s, a once-proud genre he feels has been unfairly forgotten.

“I’d never seen Fatal Attraction until last year,” Jefferson told the Sarajevo audience, “and it kind of blew me away how good it was. I think Adrian Lyne is a genius. Then I started rewatching Indecent Proposal, and Single White Female, and Basic Instinct, all these erotic thrillers in the canon. And I was like: why don’t we make movies about this any more? This stuff is really great. These really big genres that I grew up loving have just kind of fallen by the wayside.”

Listen to the Cinephile podcast on ‘American Fiction’:

The episodic structure of Avant-Drag! becomes repetitive in places, and much of the film is too light on background context. But overall, Ieropoulos delivers an appealing fusion of aesthetics and polemics. With drag queens now a mainstream TV phenomenon, alongside ongoing worldwide struggles for gay and trans rights, this hard-hitting queer-pride statement should generate healthy audience appeal. Currently on a prize-winning festival run, it screens in Sarajevo this week.

Avant-Drag! is a sobering reminder that drag was not always wholesome family entrainment but an edgy, marginalised subculture often born form trauma, rejection and violence. In socially and religious conservative nations like Greece, stepping outside gender norms is still brave and often dangerous. One notorious case referred to throughout the film is the killing of Zacharias “Zackie Oh” Kostopoulos in 2018. A friend of the director and several others on this project, Kostopoulos was brutally beaten in broad daylight on an Athens street by two men, one belonging to a far-right political party, then beaten again by two police officers. He died on his way to hospital. Although the killers were eventually jailed, the police were exonerated.

Despite these darker elements, Avant-Drag! is mostly a defiantly celebratory, visually vivacious film. It mainly consists of concise artist profiles that blend conventional interview material with short performance pieces shot on vintage-looking video. Each chapter is loosely linked by poetic chunks of narration, voiced by actress Marisha Triantafyllidou. “The city is a battlefield,” she softly sighs. “Our stories were not written in some Bible… they were written in glitter on sidewalks, trash and sewers.”

The oldest case study featured here is Kangela Tromokratisch, a middle-aged “riot housewife” who modelled her garish, surreal look on her hero, Australian fashion designer and performance artist Leigh Bowery. Following a traumatic childhood, Kangela says her drag alter ego is “a much more complete version of myself.” Another visually striking act is the male-female duo, Parakatyanova and SerGay Parakatyanov, who combine opera and drag in a witty parody of traditional gender roles. Their fabulous, outandish costumes are, they claim, “mirrors that show the ridiculousness of our enemies.”

In Ieropoulos’ conception, drag is clearly a broad church, and indeed a sacrilegious one. Several featured performers steal and subvert religious imagery, clothing and symbols to attack the conservative, sexist, homophobic culture of the Greek Orthodox faith. One of the bravest is drag king El Libido, who dresses as a dominatrix nun, handing out pro-abortion leaflets to unsuspecting motorists and inserting candles into her, ahem, inner sanctum.

A shared anger towards nationalism, fascism and anti-immigrant rhetoric also unites this politically engaged group. A brash, blonde-wigged, chain-smoking “turbo-folk” diva calling herself Aurora Poala Maredo is one of film’s most amusing self-made creations, exaggerating her Albanian heritage to critique the “Hellenisation” of migrants from Greece’s northerly neighbour, who are imported as cheap labour but routinely face racism. “Ethnicity is a terrible performance,” Aurora explains as she stops traffic with her plate-smashing antics in downtown Athens, like a walking PhD thesis in Intersectional Queer Theory.

Avant-Drag! culminates in a dinner party bringing together all the performers, who share a lively discussion about fear and shame, cancel culture, pink-washing, HIV survivor’s guilt, the meagre financial rewards of experimental art, and more. These juicy debates deserve more screen time than the soundbites they get here. A more journalistically rigorous director might also have probed more deeply into what unites and divides this disparate group.

Even so, the film’s take-home message is compassionate and cautiously hopeful, as warm smiles for the camera harden into intense stares while Beethoven’s Ode To Joy swells on the soundtrack, a slightly sinister coda which feels like a winking homage to Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971). “We are the light after the darkness,” Triantafyllidou intones in voice-over, “we are more than real, we are the truth.” This is pure poetic pretension, of course. But on its own terms, wise and beautiful too.

Director, editing: Fil Ieropoulos
Cast: Kangela Tromokratisch, Er Libido, Aurora Paola Morado, Parakatyanova, SerGay Parakatyanov, McMorait, Cotsos, Lala Kolopi, Veronique Tromokratisch, Cruella Tromokratisch, Marisha Triantafyllidou
Cinematography: Mihalis Gkatzogias
Texts: Foivos Dousos
Music: Lykourgos Porfyris
Producers: Foivos Dousos, Sebastian Strakowicz, Spyros Patsouras
Production company, world sales: FYTA (Greece)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Human Rights Day)
In Greek
92 minutes

Family Therapy is impressive and imaginative, but not flawless, with a sprawling two-hours runtime that meanders in places, plus a final act that lacks focus or conviction. Even so, this is an unusually bold, witty, high-gloss production for such a small nation with a modest cinematic footprint. World premiered at Tribeca in June, Prosenc’s third feature makes its European debut in competition at Sarajevo Film Festival this week. With its universal themes, caustic humour and classy production values, it could even have crossover potential as Slovenia’s answer to Saltburn (2023).

Prosenc opens with a slow-motion shot of a car bursting into flames, an attention-grabbing image set to a lively chamber-orchestra score. Meanwhile, at the airport, pompous aspiring writer Aleksander (a clownish, compellingly weasly Marko Mandic) is awkwardly trying to introduce his art-gallery manager wife Olivia (Katarina Stegnar) and sullen teenage daughter Agata (Mila Bezjak) to his other child, Julien (Aliocha Schneider), the twentysomething son from a previous relationship who he is meeting for the first time. As this well-heeled quartet drive home, they spot another family stranded by their burned-out car, but they suppress any Good Samaritan urges and just keep going.

Most of the action takes place in and around the wealthy family’s gorgeous country villa, a glass-walled modernist fortress nestled in an idyllic woodland landscape. Aleksander and Olivia are initially wary around Julien, who does not share their privileged background and highbrow pretensions. Indeed, the new arrival strikes a wrong note early in his visit when he welcomes the stranded family from the roadside, who call by asking for help, even inviting them to stay overnight. This grudging act of charity leaves a sour taste, with Olivia unable to sleep for fear of the “refugees”, treating her guests more like prisoners.

Julien’s inscrutable, quietly subversive presence also awakens the sickly Agata’s rebellious streak. Bored to distraction with heavy-handed parental control, sterile rules and home-schooling lessons, she starts pushing against the bars of her gilded cage, flirting shamelessly with her new-found stepbrother and inviting him out for forbidden walks in the forest. Julien also revives long-dormant sexual feelings in Olivia, whose marriage has reached a frosty impasse. Aleksander, meanwhile, is obsessed with a competition prize offering a trip into space, firmly convinced this will validate his self-image as beloved dad to a perfect family, a desperate charade he is scrabbling to maintain at all costs.

Family Therapy was initially titled Redemption, and now sports the subtitle Redemption For Beginners, with further chapter headings emblazoned on screen throughout: The Chosen Ones for a deluxe dinner party that ends in chaos and injury, for example, or Under Control for a sequence in which the family begin to fall apart, as signalled by a heavily symbolic window cracking and breaking. While most of these headlines drip with irony, the final act hammers home this redemptive theme with far more heavy-handed sincerity. Here Prosenc substitutes scathing detachment for empathy, revealing her protagonists not as snobbish upper-class monsters but as sick, vulnerable, lonely, needy, typically flawed humans.

This sentimental pay-off is generous but, after two long hours, slow to arrive and oddly clumsy. Prosenc intends Family Therapy to critique how the wealthy increasingly isolate themselves from the rest of society, but in her rush to absolve everyone, she leaves too many issues unresolved, from Julien’s sexual transgressions to the thinly drawn poorer family’s lingering sense of injustice. If stripping down to your underwear and wrestling random strangers to the ground is evidence of emotional closure, then sure, we could call this a happy ending. But this audacious Slovenian rhapsody untimately bows out as a sporadically great misfire rather than the finely crafted, sharply observed, skewering satire promised during its first 90 minutes.

That said, on an aesthetic level, Family Therapy has plenty to excuse its ungainly plot and inconsistent characters. Prosenc and her team stuff every scene with visual riches, arty allusions and wry in-jokes, including an audio clip of Slovenian left-wing cultural critic Slavoj Zizek discussing Europe’s immigration anxieties during the “refugee” sequence. Cinematographer Mitja Licen also fills the screen with meticulously composed, brightly hued tableaux, including a live-action reaction of the famous portrait of Shakespeare’s Ophelia by 19th century painter John Everett Millais. A prominently deployed Baroque-pastiche score by electronic duo Silence, aka Primoz Hladnik and Boris Benko, blends Henry Purcell homages with hints of off-key dissonance, an elegant musical metaphor for the discord lurking below this family’s outwardly harmonious surface.

Director, screenwriter: Sonja Prosenc
Cast: Marko Mandic, Mila Bezjak, Katarina Stegnar, Aliocha Schneider, Judita Frankovic Brdar, Jure Henigman
Cinematography: Mitja Licen
Editing: Ivana Fumic
Production design: Tatjana Canic Stankovic
Costume designers: Dubravka Skvrce, Gilda Venturini
Music: Silence
Producers: Rok Secen, Sonja Prosenc
Production company, world sales: Monoo (Slovenia)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Feature Film Competition)
In Slovenian, English, French
122 minutes

This time, Tanovic is operating in a lighter register than usual, directing and co-writing a female-driven rom-com with a light sprinkling of midlife melancholy. The cumulative effect is modestly charming and sporadically amusing, but this pan-Balkan co-production never quite hits the target either as sharp-witted comedy or insightful drama. Following its Sarajevo debut, My Late Summer is more likely to garner local love than global interest.

The film’s main screenplay credit belongs to its engaging star, Anja Matkovic. She plays Maja, a 30-ish woman who embarks on sentimental journey to a sleepy holiday island off the Croatian coast just as the summer tourist season is fading. Agitated after learning she is the illegitimate daughter of one of the island’s most celebrated citizens, a wealthy pillar of the community who has recently died, Maja plans to legally challenge his surviving family for her share of inheritance. But while she lingers on the island, stuck in legal limbo, she stumbles into working as a barmaid for the town’s laidback mayor Icho (Goran Navojec), a mischievous but likeable old-school socialist who makes a handsome living from his quayside bar and secret marijuana plantation.

One regular at Icho’s bar is Sasa (Uliks Fehmiu), a soulfully handsome 50-ish writer newly returned to Croatia after long exile in New York. Predictably, his flirtatious chemistry with Maja soon blossoms into a full-blown affair. Even more predictably, their blissful sunset swims and hot sex sessions can not last, as family secrets and messy baggage get in the way. In the process, Maja turns from Slavic Pixie Dream Girl to tragic diva, devastated that her brief holiday fling looks unlikely to turn into the life-changing long-term romance she was apparently expecting after a week of casual dating. But her disillusion serves as a liberating life lesson, the belated coming-of-age implied by the film’s title.

Around this slender central plot, Matkovic and Tanovic assemble a lively background chorus of small-town eccentrics, incompetent policemen, failed lotharios, trigger-happy grandmothers and more. There are jokes here about former Yugoslavian dictator Marshall Tito that will not make much sense outside the Balkans, plus plenty of slapstick humour that probably will. All of which is modestly engaging on a soapy rom-com level, but ultimately fairly inconsequential, conventional and clumsy by Tanovic’s standards. Case in point: a crucial sequence featuring a stampede of stoned cows should have been much funnier, or even scarier, than it ends up on screen. A gloriously silly comic concept falls flat due to sloppy, low-energy execution.

My Late Summer is not devoid of charm. As an exercise in cinematic escapism, it is effortlessly easy on the senses, as any film should be that uses Croatia’s sun-bleached coastline and the turquoise Adriatic sea as its handsome visual backdrop. Constrained by a narrow budget, Tanovic and his team shot the story in sequence, capturing several scenes in single extended shots. This creates an agreeably loose, freewheeling energy that suits the more indie-movie dramatic interludes, but is less effective when the tighter choreography of comedy is required. Music features heavily, both as score and diegetic detail, with pleasing prominence given to Slovenian art-punk provocateurs Laibach and rousing Yugoslavian anti-fascist partisan songs.

Director: Danis Tanovic
Screenplay: Anja Matkovic, Nikola Kuprešanin, Danis Tanovic
Cast: Anja Matkovic, Uliks Fehmiu, Goran Navojec, Mario Knezovic, Marija Škaricic, Mirela Brekalo, Snježana Sinovcic, Luka Juricic, Boris Ler, Ivana Rošcic, Jadranka Matkovic
Cinematography: Miloš Jacimovic
Editor: Redžinald Šimek
Music: Livina Tanovic
Producers: Lana Matic, Boris T. Matic
Production companies: Propeler Film (Croatia), Obala Art Centar (Bosnia), Baš Celik (Serbia), Tramal Films (Slovenia)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (opening gala screening)
In Serbo-Croatian
98 minutes