Interviews

Jihan K’s father Mansur Rashid Kikhia was a human rights lawyer, Libya’s foreign minister and ambassador to the United Nations. But he was also opposed to then-Libyan leader Colonel Qaddafi. Mansur disappeared on a trip to Cairo in 1993 while attending a human rights conference. Director Jihan was six when her father went missing. “I'm dealing with a real existential crisis where my father is stuck in the dream realm,” she tells BDE. “The film is a tool to make something concrete out of my father, to create a portrait of my father.”

HBO’s Hanka Kastelicová and Tereza Bóna Keilová filled in BDE at Sarajevo 2025 on company activities in the CEE region. HBO Max has a huge global footprint, available in around 70 languages and the service continues to open in ever more territories. “One thing that never changes is that HBO is a synonym for quality,” Kastelicová insists to BDE that the company’s rapid growth hasn’t compromised standards.

Croatian Dalija Dozet’s father Danko filmed everything, and drove everybody to distraction in the process. He filled over 300 tapes that he never subsequently watched. But his untimely death just after his 55th birthday created a void in his family that could not be filled. Until Dalija decided to assess all the footage he shot, tape by tape. “I wanted to know him more. I wanted to discover him and see who he was. So I just started to watch it,” she tells BDE.

Queer artist Ivo Dimchev is a showman, a provocateur and an amazing songwriter, but the prospect of being the focus of Kristina Nikolova’s feature doc wasn’t one that he relished at first. “Many times it was such a nightmare for me and Kristina to deal with it, especially when other people got involved,” he tells BDE. “[But] now it’s over, I have no other feelings than love and gratefulness. What we made is extremely precious to me.”

Slow and meditative, at times accompanied by a soundtrack both sinister and rasping, the the Ukrainian feature doc Divia presents an apocalyptic vision of nature destroyed by war. “It’s hard to put some emotions into words, because most of them are inside this project – it’s really personal, and it’s hard to realise how many natural resources have been destroyed, mined, or occupied by Russian military forces,” says director Dmytro Hreshko.

Nasmi, the youngest of three brothers, was born in Germany to Roma parents who had fled the war in Kosovo. Nevertheless he was ‘returned’ to a horrific IDP camp in Kosovo in 2009 - together with his mother and middle brother Sedat - after the German authorities tightened its asylum laws. Roma director Katalin Bársony chronicled Nasmi’s story over the next 15 years. “The film is not just about borders, identity papers, or policy failures, though all of those are part of the story,” she says. “At its core, this is a film about love, separation, and the enduring desire for home.”

“Damir Markovina shares his story without reservations,” Croatian producer Tamara Babun Zovko (Wolfgang & Dolly LLC) underlines to BDE of the CineLink Rough Cut presentation We Shall Live Together. In the film, thirty years after the war in the Balkans, two brothers urge their father - former Bosnian Socialist MP Roko Markovina - to return to the place they were exiled from, their divided hometown of Mostar, a city made up of hurt, trauma, and precious memories…

Croatian producer Oliver Sertić (Restarted) fills in BDE on Anton Mezulić’s debut feature Cordon, which follows footballer Nikola, the product of a mixed marriage and now approaching manhood, but who is all the while dealing with a chaotic past and an uncertain future. It is a “coming-of-age story of a young man from a small, godforsaken Croatian town that remains ethnically divided thirty years after the war,” says Sertić.

Dina Karaman and Evgeny Rodin have set their new hybrid documentary, selected as a Work-in-Progress in Sarajevo, in a psychiatric hospital within an unspecified location. “The project's hybrid and docufiction nature, coupled with the fact that it was shot in a difficult-to-access location and later narrated as not belonging to any specific geography, could appeal to audiences by moving it away from the documentary and towards fiction, or even a musical,” say the filmmakers.

In Jakob Krese’s new feature doc, three generations of a [former] Yugoslav family reflect on over half a century of upheaval, hope, destruction, and new beginnings. “The grandmother fought with the partisans against fascism while the mother - a remarkable poet, writer, journalist, and humanitarian aid worker - decided to support her friends during the siege of Sarajevo,” Slovenian producer Ivana Naceva tells BDE. “Now Jakob is passing this legacy on to his young daughter.”