Sarajevo Film Festival Unveils 2026 Lineup: Pawlikowski Opener, Tanović Anniversary Closer, Four Honorary Hearts
The 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival opens tomorrow, August 14, in Sarajevo, Bosnia, running through August 21 with a lineup that stretches from a Cannes-winning opening film to a 25th-anniversary closing night. Festival director Jovan Marjanović and his team have programmed 21 world premieres, 6 international premieres, 1 European premiere and 23 regional premieres across the competition sections, according to Variety.
The opening film is Fatherland, a period drama by Polish filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski that won best director at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. The closing slot goes to No Man's Land, the Academy Award-winning war satire by Bosnian director Danis Tanović, screening to mark the film's quarter-century. Few festival bookends pair a current Cannes prizewinner with a hometown Oscar winner quite so neatly.
The main feature competition includes regional premieres of Shame and Money by Visar Morina, Everytime by Sandra Wollner, and Dua by Blerta Basholli, alongside nine films from Southeast Europe in the narrative feature section, per Variety. Everything That's Wrong With You, the fourth feature from Slovenian director Urša Menart, has its world premiere. Regional premieres also bring festival-circuit names to Sarajevo audiences: Fjord by Cristian Mungiu, a Palme d'Or winner at Cannes; Minotaur by Andrei Zvyagintsev; and Wollner's Everytime. More than 50 films from Southeast Europe screen across the various competition strands.
Four Honorary Heart of Sarajevo awards will be handed out. Emily Watson heads the feature film competition jury and receives the festival's tribute prize. Woody Harrelson collects one too, paired with a screening of Michael Winterbottom's 1997 film Welcome to Sarajevo, in which he appeared as a journalist covering the siege of the city.
Mexican actor, director and producer Diego Luna receives an Honorary Heart alongside a screening of Ashes, his fifth directorial feature, which premiered at Cannes earlier this year. Two-time Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi rounds out the quartet, honoured with a career-spanning retrospective of his work.
The festival also looks backward through its tributes programme. The legacy of Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr — known for his long, formally rigorous works — will be celebrated, per Variety. A masterclasses programme runs alongside the screenings, and online ticket sales are open through the festival's official site.
What gives this edition its texture is the pull between local and global. More than 50 Southeast European films anchor the programme, yet the honorary guests span Hollywood, Mexico City and Tehran. A festival that began in 1995, under siege-era conditions, now opens with a Polish Cannes laureate and closes with the Bosnian film that won the foreign-language Oscar in 2002 — the same year the festival turned seven.
The 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival runs August 14–21, 2026, in Sarajevo and online.
