Montenegrin Documentary To Hold a Mountain Opens in New York on December 16
Submarine Deluxe will open To Hold a Mountain at Film Forum in New York on December 16, Deadline reported. A national rollout in the United States will follow the New York run.
The film then heads to television. It is set to premiere on HBO and HBO Max in early 2027. A cinema run before a streaming debut is known as a theatrical window, the stretch of time when a film plays in cinemas before it reaches home screens.
Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazić directed the film, and they spent eight years making it. It follows Gara and her 13-year-old daughter Nada on the Sinjajevina plateau in Montenegro. The dialogue is in Montenegrin, with English subtitles.
The film's festival run has been long. It premiered at Sundance, where it won the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema Documentary. Since then it has won the Grand Prix at Millennium Docs Against Gravity in Poland, Best Documentary Feature at the Sarajevo Film Festival, and the Jury Prize for Documentary Feature at the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Film Festival. At RiverRun in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Tutorov and Glomazić shared the award for Best Documentary Directors.
Awards bodies have also taken notice. The film was shortlisted for the IDA Documentary Awards and the European Film Awards. DOC NYC placed it on its Short List of the year's top Oscar contenders. It was also programmed at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival.
Montenegro has chosen the film as its entry for Best International Feature Film at the 99th Academy Awards. A country's entry is a submission for the foreign-language category, and it does not guarantee a nomination. Next, the film will screen at IDFA in Amsterdam and at DOC NYC.
On the business side, MetFilm Sales has acquired the international sales rights, which means the company will sell the film to buyers outside its home market, Variety reported in February.
Each step on this route, from a festival programmer choosing a title to a sales company taking it abroad, was a decision made by someone. The December 16 date is the newest of those decisions, and it puts a Montenegrin film on a New York screen in the final weeks of the year.
