Diego Luna's Ashes and Paweł Pawlikowski's Fatherland will open the Open Air section of the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival, which runs 14–21 August, while Danis Tanović's 2001 Oscar winner No Man's Land closes the programme — a homecoming for a film made in and about the country at war with itself The Hollywood Reporter.

The Open Air Premiere programme, screened at the UNIQA Open Air Cinema Stari Grad in the heart of the old town, brings together the most anticipated new films from the former Yugoslavia and beyond. Audiences vote for the best film, which receives the Prix Cineplexx.

Luna, who will receive the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo at this edition, will present Ashes in person and give a masterclass Variety. The film, which premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, follows two siblings forced to leave Mexico for Madrid to reunite with a mother who left earlier chasing a better future — only to find the reality far harsher than imagined. Woody Harrelson, another Honorary Heart of Sarajevo recipient this year, will be fêted with a screening of Michael Winterbottom's 1997 film Welcome to Sarajevo, also part of the Open Air bill.

The programme spans a wide geographic range. Andrey Zvyagintsev's Minotaur, which premiered at Cannes, follows a company director named Gleb under siege from corporate pressures and an increasingly unstable world. Shahrbanoo Sadat's No Good Men, which opened the Berlinale earlier this year, is set for its Sarajevo premiere; the film centres on Naru, the only camerawoman at Kabul's main television station, fighting to keep custody of her three-year-old son after leaving her unfaithful husband. Annemarie Jacir's Palestine 36 and Rodrigo Sorogoyen's The Beloved round out the international selections.

The regional slate is deep. Miroslav Terzić's 3 Weeks After, Miha Hočevar's Hidden People, Marijana Jankovic's Home, Igor Jelinović's Honey Bunny, Darko Štante's The Lost Son, Predrag Ličina's The Virus of Pathological Kindness, and Hari Šečić's The Widower all screen in Open Air. The Widower follows a 62-year-old electrician raised in a patriarchal society who, after the sudden death of his wife Enisa, confronts a life in which he took her for granted.

The closing film carries its own weight of history. No Man's Land, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2002, is set in 1993 during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Its story traps Čiki, a soldier in the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the same trench as Nino, a Bosnian Serb soldier — two enemies forced into proximity by a conflict neither can control. Screening it under the Sarajevo sky, more than two decades after its release, closes the Open Air programme on a note that needs no amplification.

For a festival that has built its identity around cinema in the open air — free, communal, and visible to anyone walking past — the lineup pairs new work from across the world with a film that belongs to the city itself.