Sarajevo 26

Peter Akar and Rita Balogh’s feature project Kind of Adults, presented in Sarajevo, is described as “a raw, immersive coming-of-age documentary co-created with charismatic Gen Z teens over six turbulent years.” The film won two awards during CineLink; the DOK Leipzig Preview Award, and the East Doc Caravan Award. “We did not set out to explain a generation. We simply stayed with the same group of young people long enough to witness how time quietly transformed them, and us,” comments Akar.

Seven highly promising docs from CEE, scheduled for theatrical release over the next 12 months were presented on Sunday August 16 as part of CineLink Industry Days at Sarajevo FF. The Docu Talent Award went to the Luxembourg–Slovak co–production Ora et Labora (pictured) by Dzhovani Gospodinov, while the DAFilms.com VoD distribution Award went to the Slovak project Retuning directed by Sára Prokopová. Ji.hlava IDFF further revealed the professionals for the Emerging Producers programme 2027, and the Guest Country of Ji.hlava IDFF 2026 as Montenegro.

Dublin-based former Yugoslavian filmmaker Dragana Jurišić talks to Business Doc Europe about her debut documentary, a film both joyous and heart-rending, which tells the stories of maverick filmmaker Hari Džekson, a director of westerns, and his home town of Bijeljina, where the war in Bosnia started in 1992. In the feature doc, Jurišić also sets out to create her own western in the style of Hari. “When we were filming, everyone came together - Serbs, Roma, Muslims, Croats. It was such a joyful happy atmosphere, and there was absolutely no reason why these people shouldn't be friends - except for these man-made identity structures that are imposed on them.”

In a village on the edge of an expanding coal mine in southwest Turkey, five women – olive farmers and housewives – transform from neighbours into activists in order to protect their forest, the last natural barrier between the mine and their community. "I hope [the film] leaves audiences with the feeling that meaningful change often begins by transforming people long before it transforms the world,” says director Selen Çatalyürekli. The project won the Movies That Matter Award in Sarajevo.

Gara and daughter Nada live on a gorgeous, sparsely populated plateau, which the Montenegrin military is eyeing up as a NATO shooting range. To Hold a Mountain, selected for Sarajevo Documentary Competition, explains their resistance not through arguments, but through the sublime beauty of the landscape. Because to be there, to live on this ancestral mountain, is to experience the most wondrous sense of space.

In his new feature doc, world-premiering in Sarajevo, Damir Markovina urges his father, politician Roko Markovina, both to return to the Bosnian city of Mostar from which he exiled himself over 30 years ago, and to acknowledge the repercussions of the personal and political choices and decisions he took back then. “If you don't deal with a problem, your children will have to deal with it, in one way or another,” the director tells BDE.

Dutch producer Renko Douze discusses Ukrainian Helena Maksyom’s feature doc Don't Ask Me If I Killed, sold by Esther van Messel’s First Hand Films, that chronicles the director’s life as a soldier in defence of her country. “It’s such a special and individual story. It’s really her story - and a very human perspective on the frontline,” Douze says of the film, receiving its International Premiere in Sarajevo Documentary Competition.

In her new feature doc, world-premiering at Sarajevo FF, Dutch-based Croatian director Tatjana Bozic discusses the business of loneliness, and being a stranger in a strange land. “It explores the loss of roots, community, and identity through the lens of migration and motherhood. As I discovered while making the film, the feeling of not belonging often begins long before we cross borders, it starts within our own families.”

Seven new major projects from Central and Eastern Europe will be presented August 16 during the 22nd edition of Docu Talents from the East at Sarajevo FF's CineLink Industry Days. All the selected projects are currently in post-production, with premieres expected between September 2026 and August 2027. The most promising projects will be awarded by an international jury and announced during a prize ceremony on August 17. 

Five near-ready doc projects will be presented August 16 during the CineLink Industry Days of the 32nd Sarajevo FF. Industry Days marks the final staging post in the three-module series that kicked off at Sofia in May 2026. Organised by CineLink and the Balkan Documentary Center, Docu Rough Cut Boutique is a platform dedicated to documentary projects at an advanced phase of the editing process.