Teona Mitevska and Céline Sciamma Launch 'Sister Sister' at Sarajevo Film Festival
Filmmakers Teona Mitevska and Céline Sciamma will launch a female-empowerment initiative called Sister Sister at this year's Sarajevo Film Festival, with a public conversation scheduled for 20 August at 1 p.m. in the city's Festival Garden.
The initiative carries what Mitevska and Sciamma call a "bold, punk and revolutionary" vision: to reshape the role of women across the film and television industries by fostering sisterhood and togetherness among women working in every discipline the business touches. The plan is to collectively draw up a manifesto addressing the concerns and ideals of women in the industry, according to Variety Variety.
At the heart of Sister Sister's Sarajevo launch is a think tank bringing together female filmmakers, producers, writers and academics from the former Yugoslavia. Participants will sit for three moderated roundtables, identifying challenges and formulating recommendations intended to feed into that manifesto.
Mitevska, a North Macedonian filmmaker born in Skopje, runs the production company Sisters and Brother Mitevski with her brother Vuk and her sister Labina — a family outfit that produced The Happiest Man in the World Klassiki. Her latest feature, Mother, starring Noomi Rapace as a young Mother Teresa, opened the Horizons sidebar at the Venice Film Festival.
Sciamma, the French writer-director whose credits include Portrait of a Lady on Fire, met Mitevska at Venice in 2023, where their films screened together as a double bill in the Venice Days program. The friendship forged there became the creative engine for Sister Sister, though the initiative was first conceived after Mitevska spoke with Sarajevo Film Festival programmer Asja Krsmanović at the Manaki Brothers Film Festival.
The 20 August CineLink conversation — titled "Are We Radical Enough? Reclaiming and Redefining Women's Authorship in European Cinema" — will feature Mitevska and Sciamma alongside two directors from the region. Serbian director Jelena Maksimović, whose feature debut Until the Day Ends will premiere in Venice's Horizons strand, joins the panel. So does Kosovo-born Blerta Basholli, whose debut Hive won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2021. Basholli's latest film, Dua, premiered at Cannes Critics' Week and will compete at Sarajevo.
The breadth of that panel — a North Macedonian auteur, a French film-maker, a Serbian first-timer and a Sundance-winning Kosovan director — points to the scope Sister Sister is reaching for: not a single national conversation but a cross-border network of women comparing notes on the structures that shape what reaches screens.
What makes this stand out is the format. Manifestos in the film world tend to arrive as printed declarations or festival-night speeches. Sister Sister is starting with roundtables, in a region whose film industries are still shaped by post-conflict reconstruction, and letting the manifesto emerge from those conversations rather than preceding them.
