At the 31st Sarajevo Film Festival, the entire city feels like a big party. By night it’s almost impossible to walk down the main streets as crowds spill outside dancing. At the foot of Bosnia’s green hills, the festival has been held annually since 1995, founded in the aftermath of the devastating four-year siege of Sarajevo during the Balkan wars. Today, it stands as the most important cinema event in southeast Europe, attracting visitors from around the world. This year, special guests include Willem Dafoe, Paolo Sorrentino, and Ilya Khrzhanovsky.
During the summer months, Sarajevo becomes a refuge for swaths of tourists and Gulf expats escaping the heat of Dubai for Bosnia’s temperate climate, with thunderstorms moving some open-air screenings indoors. At the airport, travelers are greeted by Arabic-language billboards advertising luxury real estate. In the heart of the city, around the central marketplace with its iconic Sebilj fountain, the streets are lined with Turkish tea stalls and Ottoman-era mosques, reminders of Sarajevo’s textured history.
The festival accommodates some guests at the iconic Holiday Hotel, a bright yellow building just outside the old town. It was built for the 1984 Winter Games, an event that remains a source of pride for Sarajevans. Some say those were the best weeks the city ever had, followed by its darkest years. The emblem of the Olympics is still everywhere, printed on keychains and mugs. On Mount Trebević, the former bobsled track has become a major tourist attraction. I walked along the crumbling concrete on a rainy afternoon, meeting only a few people and four wild horses.
The Holiday Hotel itself keeps a wonderfully faded eighties glory (back then, it was called Holiday Inn), with patchy Wi-Fi and a hotel bar that’s always closed. When Susan Sontag first came to besieged Sarajevo in April 1993, she also “stayed at the Holiday Inn, a cheerful yellow building whose name associated it with middle-class vacations in unperturbed destinations.” A scant decade after the Winter Games, the hotel “found itself stranded at the end of a wide avenue … notorious all over the world as Sniper Alley.” The main road from the airport into the city center, Sniper Alley was encircled by high-rise buildings from whose rooftops the occupiers would target civilians moving around the city, including children fetching water.
When Sontag visited, the Holiday Inn was one of the few places in the city where breakfast was still served, cooked over an open fire on the kitchen floor. There was not enough water for toilets to flush. After her first visit, Sontag would come eleven more times. Sarajevo was a place so important to her that her son considered burying her there. After living in Bosnia for many months, back in New York City she would infamously scoff at anyone who hadn’t been there. Today, a square in the city is named after her: Pozorišni trg – Susan Sontag is located in front of the National Theater and is one of the festival’s main venues.
In July 1993, Sontag returned to Sarajevo to direct Waiting for Godot. During that hot summer, everything was scarce—drinking water, fuel, food, and electricity. She brought her friend, the photographer Annie Leibovitz, who captured the maternity ward at Koševo Hospital (where mothers gave birth without anesthesia), and a murdered boy, later published in Vanity Fair. Sontag changed her mind about photography that summer, moving from observation to activism. She became known among Sarajevans for her refusal to wear a flak jacket and would bring in money, medication, and liquor, take out mail, and help people leave for safer countries. Sarajevo later made her an honorary citizen.
“Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country,” Sontag wrote in Regarding the Pain of Others, “is a quintessential modern experience,” witnessed by those “specialized tourists known as journalists. Wars are now also living room sights and sounds.” She recalls how during the siege, it was not unusual to hear Sarajevans yell at photojournalists in the middle of a sniper fire: “Are you waiting for a shell to go off so you can photograph some corpses?” For Sontag, war photography has a dual effect: it simultaneously raises awareness and numbs sensitivity to others’ suffering. The “CNN effect … brought images of Sarajevo under siege into hundreds of millions of living rooms night after night for more than three years.”
After her first visit, safely in Berlin, Sontag wrote to a friend that “to go to Sarajevo now is a bit like what it must have been to visit the Warsaw Ghetto in late 1942.” This was not a flippant remark; she was among the first to declare the massacres in Bosnia a genocide. She recalled that, very much like today, all the German writers she spoke to seemed completely indifferent to the genocide broadcast daily into their living rooms. She wrote later that we can only hope “(so far in vain) to stop genocide and to bring to justice those who commit gross violations of the laws of war.”
It was during the siege, in February 1993, that the city’s film festival was born from a movie club in the basement of Apollo Cinema, initiated by Miro Purivatra. Visitors entered the “cinema” though a hole in the wall of the Obala Art Center, after an arduous journey through sniper fire, descending a steep flight of stairs. Scottish filmmaker Marc Cousins, who brought VHS tapes of Hitchcock and Buñuel, Twin Peaks, and Basic Instinct to Sarajevo, recalls: “Everyone smoked. The audience of 120 was the most mixed I’ve ever seen—lots of local people, young activists, military, aid workers, an ambassador or two … People were so thin. The chairs were hard and packed together.” People risked their lives to get to the movies and it was the spirit of cinema that kept Sarajevo alive in its darkest times.
The late-night open-air premiere of Dušan Varda’s documentary Radio Rambo Amadeus is set beneath a starry sky, against the backdrop of the illuminated City Hall, a building recently restored after its near-total destruction during the war. Varda portrays legendary Montenegro-born musician Rambo Amadeus (Antonije Pušić) and his latest eccentric venture: a radio station broadcasting nothing but his own songs, spanning nearly half a century. On screen, Amadeus has an electric presence, cracking jokes, making up little songs on the spot, and waxing lyrical. Amadeus is a Balkan icon, at once musician, sailor, philosopher, poet, comedian, and cultural provocateur.
Varda’s film traces the restless imagination of ex-Yugoslavia’s most iconic pop star, his artistic experiments, and reflections on music and identity, all drenched in the absurd humor that defines his persona. The light-hearted documentary offers an intimate glimpse into Amadeus’s mad cosmos without mystifying him. The self-proclaimed author of Eurovision’s worst song with his 2012 entry “Euro-Neuro,” Amadeus has since the eighties wildly mixed genres—including rock, jazz, opera, hip-hop, and Balkan folk—into a bizarrely iconic sound. (He also invented the term “turbo folk,” a popular techno genre in nineties Serbia.) In 1989, he briefly hosted an erotic TV quiz show in Sarajevo, a city to which he returned decades later for the festival, where he joined Varda on stage after the film.
With his darkly satirical lyrics, Amadeus is ambiguous about politics. Varda shows him reflecting wryly on his role during the Yugoslav wars, dubbing himself “soldier Švejk” in reference to the Czech cultural figure of the lazy soldier. He also reveals his ultimate passion: boats. Amadeus was once a professional sailor, representing Yugoslavia in international regattas. Splitting his time between Belgrade and Montenegro’s coast, he appears onscreen as an eccentric silver fox sailing through the Bay of Kotor (he hates jet skis), or laughing at himself while broadcasting to a handful of fans. The Sarajevo crowd constantly erupts in laughter, with one woman summing it up: “We all love Rambo Amadeus! We grew up with his music.”
Another aged Balkan singer is at the center of Ivana Mladenović’s hilarious Sorella di Clausura, which wins her the Heart of Sarajevo award for best director. Sleazy Boban, often dressed in a white suit, is the lifelong crush of thirty-six-year-old Stela (played by Katia Pascariu, known from Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn). Love-sick Stela even stalks the Serbian star into his hotel, flashing her boobs just before the elevator doors shut. Hoping to escape her precarious job in a factory, Stela manages to contact the singer Vera Pop, a rumored mistress of Boban, through Facebook (“out of my way, smallfry!”). Vera offers Stela a job in Bucharest, where she runs a sex shop during Romania’s brief post-EU boom.
The editor interested in Stela’s book about her infatuation calls her “Boban’s nun.” The film’s title refers to a nun’s choir which only sings after taking an oath of silence, we are told. When the 2008 crisis hits, poor Stela becomes Vera’s house servant, until she finally meets the object of her obsession. Mladenović’s film is transgressive, cynical, and extremely cringy (there’s various awkward sex scenes, one involving a Boban poster). It’s full of vulgarities and tasteless jokes, what the director calls “truck-driver humor” (de autobază). Stela is an antiheroine who doesn’t want to please, and neither does Mladenović, which makes her film so anarchic and fun to watch.
Sorella di Clausura is based on real life, though it’s cautioned at the beginning: “If you thought you were going to watch a film based on true events, you are wrong and possibly paranoid.” The film is inspired by the singer Anca Pop, who tragically died in a car accident. After starring in Ivana the Terrible, Pop gave Mladenović a manuscript by Liliana Pelici, a poor woman from Timișoara, about her obsession with a musician. The director found Pelici’s The Longest Dream, a sort of Romanian I Love Dick, “so funny and so witty and … merciless … a punk, edgy humor with merciless self-irony” that she made it into a script, eventually convincing her own father to play Boban.
Screened in the Dealing with the Past section, Želimir Žilnik’s early short June Turmoil records the 1968 student demonstration in Belgrade, before the director went on to become one of the most important figures of the Yugoslav Black Wave. Žilnik also presents his latest, Eighty Plus (Restitucija, ili, San i java stare garde), following pensioner Milan Kovačević, who returns to Novi Sad to reclaim the house that was expropriated from his family during World War II. Eighty Plus is slow-burn docu-fiction, charming and cheeky but lacking the activist energy of Žilnik’s earlier work.
June Turmoil montages interviews with protesters, shots of group sessions, music, and footage of fiery speeches before crowds of hundreds chanting against “aristocratism” and the “red bourgeoisie,” a reference to members of the communist apparatus who were fiercely rejected by the new generation. Žilnik’s film critically explores the various forms the protest movement took over time, the camera moving back and forth between the individual and the masses. May 1968 swept through Yugoslavia but quickly ended after a conciliatory speech by the republic’s benign tyrant, Josip Broz Tito, who conceded to some of the students’ demands.
Amidst the current protests in Serbia, June Turmoil has new relevance as a site of collective action, remembrance, and a bridge to past protest movements. Since November last year, when a railway station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad, students have blocked main roads and universities across the country, plastered walls with red handprints and graffiti, and staged weekly silent vigils. What began with a few demands has grown into a serious challenge to President Vučić’s rule. Despite violent crackdowns and arrests, the protests continue to mobilize thousands. It’s the largest student protest in Europe since May ’68, with a similarly rebellious spirit: “This is not speculation,” one protester declares in Žilnik’s film. “The revolution is today!”
Aleksandar Reljić’s short documentary The Loudest Silence opens by listing the names of those killed in the Novi Sad tragedy. Instead of celebrating New Year’s Eve, the students entered 2025 with a fifteen-minute silence in memory of the victims, an act that inspired Reljić’s film: silence as a resistance more powerful than any speech. Nodding to Žilnik’s June Turmoil, Reljić’s camera follows the movement from the first lists of the dead read aloud in Novi Sad, through weekly Friday vigils where students block the streets, to the general strike. Reljić balances the collective with the personal. In a touching interview, parents reflect on their son’s involvement in the protests, both proud and fearful. Their memory builds another bridge when they recall their own experience at the at the 1996–97 anti-Milošević protests: “History repeats itself.”
Reljić captures moments of intimacy amid the unrest: students joking around, sharing tea, or cuddling in the university camp, their closeness fortifying the solidarity of the movement. The film’s central scene takes place on New Year’s Eve. Rather than fireworks, a drone shot reveals a sea of smartphone lights glowing against the night sky. A placard rises: “Vreme je za nove vreme” (Time for new times). Instead of celebrating the new year, the protesters gather in silence, “because we really have nothing to celebrate, but have to look forward to the next [year] and to be even more rebellious and disobedient in it.”
To be continued in Part 2.