Sarajevo Film Festival Opens Its 32nd Edition With Pawlikowski, Watson, and a City That Refuses to Forget
The 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival opens on 14 August 2026, running through 21 August across the Bosnian capital and online, with Paweł Pawlikowski's Fatherland — starring Sandra Hüller — as the opening-night film (The Hollywood Reporter).
British actress Emily Watson will head the festival's competition jury, joined by European Film Academy director Matthijs Wouter Knol, producer Athina Rachel Tsangari, filmmaker Igor Bezinović, and actress Sara Klimoska (The Hollywood Reporter). The same festival will hand its Honorary Heart of Sarajevo award to four recipients: Watson herself, Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, Mexican actor Diego Luna, and American actor Woody Harrelson.
The closing night belongs to a newly restored print of No Man's Land, the Oscar-winning 2001 Bosnian film by Danis Tanović. Harrelson's 1997 film Welcome to Sarajevo — which dramatised a journalist's experience covering the siege of the city — will also screen, tying the festival's present to the history that gave it birth.
That history is unusual. The first Sarajevo Film Festival took place in 1995, while the city was still under siege (The Hollywood Reporter). The Hollywood Reporter has described it as "the hub" for southeastern European cinema and the top cinema event for the regional film industry, spanning a belt "from Vienna to Istanbul" (The Hollywood Reporter).
Running the show is Jovan Marjanović, who joined the festival at 19 and is now 46. The 2026 edition is his fifth as sole director. Marjanović has noted that in three decades, no politician has ever given a political speech from the festival's stage — a deliberate separation that has held since the siege years (The Hollywood Reporter).
The competition features vying for the festival's top prize include Zvonimir Jurić's Small Things, Urša Menart's Everything That's Wrong With You, Kosara Mitić's 17, and Dina Duma's Skateboarding Is Not For Girls — a slate spanning Croatia, Slovenia, and North Macedonia. Beyond competition, the lineup pulls in Diego Luna's Ashes and Andrey Zvyagintsev's Minotaur, which premiered at Cannes.
The festival operates under the motto "Building Stories. Protecting Authorship." and is introducing a new Midnight Screenings strand as part of its Special Screenings programme (Sarajevo Film Festival). It is also accepting online submissions for films and drama series, reflecting a programme that stretches beyond the theatrical venues of Sarajevo itself (Sarajevo Film Festival).
What makes Sarajevo stand out on the European circuit is the contrast between its scale and its origin story. Founded in a city under bombardment, it now functions as the central market and meeting point for an industry corridor that covers much of the Balkans and beyond — a place where a restored print of a local Oscar winner sits on the same schedule as a new Pawlikowski film with Sandra Hüller, and where a jury led by Emily Watson sits alongside honorees ranging from Farhadi to Harrelson.
That the festival has kept politicians off its stage for 30 years is not a slogan but a record. In a region where cinema and politics have rarely been far apart, the separation is the point.
