Competition programme - Documentary Film 2025

Rada Šešić, the selector of the Competition Programme – Documentary Film, has included 20 films in the competition programme; 12 feature-length and 8 short documentaries, of which four films will have a world premiere, four international, 10 films will have a regional premiere, and two Bosnian and Herzegovinian premiere. In addition, one film has been selected for the out-of-competition programme and will have an international premiere.

 

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST DOCUMENTARY FILM

Award in the amount of €4,000, sponsored by the Government of Switzerland

 

AN OSCAR® QUALIFYING FILM

 

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST SHORT DOCUMENTARY FILM

Award in the amount of €2,000

 

SPECIAL JURY PRIZE

Award in the amount of €2,500

 

1. BOSNIAN KNIGHT / BOSANSKI VITEZ, Tarik Hodžić (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, 2025, 79 min.) - World premiere

 

During the Bosnian War, Sead Delić escaped to the free territory of Srebrenica, where he served as a soldier and survived the 1995 genocide. After the war, he moved to the United States and fulfilled his childhood dream of becoming a truck driver. Despite his new life, the past continued to haunt him. Seeking answers about his identity, he immersed himself in the history of medieval Bosnia, visiting fortresses, towns, and stećak tombstones. This passion gave his life new meaning and became his mission to honour Bosnia’s heritage.

 

2. I SAW A 'SUNO' / SUNO DIKHLEM, Katalin Barsony (Hungary, Belgium, 2025, 92 min.) - World premiere

 

Nasmir, the youngest of three brothers, was born in Germany to Roma parents who fled the war in Kosovo. He knew only safety—until the day police came to repatriate his brother, his mother, and himself. Sent to a ruined refugee camp in post-war northern Kosovo, they found no electricity and no clean drinking water—only the bitter cold of a country Nasmir had never known. Twelve people shared a single room. What followed was not just exile, but a loss of identity, of future, of home.

 

3. KITE / CHARTAETOS, Thanos Psichogios (Greece, 2025, 15 min.) - World premiere

 

Clean Monday. Panos, now grown, returns to a childhood ritual—flying a kite with his father, a tradition that marks the start of Lent in Greece. Memories, however, are never simple. Sounds and images, fragments of the past, weave together to reconstruct their bond. 

 

4. STEEL HOTEL SONG, Bojan Stojčić (Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2025, 19 min.) - World premiere

 

Once owned by an industrial giant, now guarded by its former employees, a hotel waits for its new buyer. Across from the hotel, at the national football stadium, a qualifying match for the UEFA Nations League is in progress.

 

5. LETTERS / PISMA, Aysel Küçüksu (Bulgaria, 2025, 11 min.) - International premiere

 

How much of ourselves have we left behind in words meant for others? A mother and daughter discover the letters they wrote to each other a decade ago. Can they face the truths they once shared?

 

6. MY DAD'S LESSONS / LEKCIJE MOG TATE, Dalija Dozet (Croatia, 2025, 62 min.) - International premiere

 

MY DAD'S LESSONS is a film essay that explores the relationship between director Dalija Dozet and her late father. When he died, he left behind hundreds of hours of recorded material—including footage of his family, recordings of the city of Osijek, Croatia, from the 1980s until his death, and imaged of the family's travels around the world. Watching all these recordings created during her father's lifetime, Dozet delves into and attempts to understand their relationship anew, expressing everything she hasn't said to him until now.

 

7. RED SLIDE / CRVENI TOBOGAN, Nebojša Slijepčević (Croatia, 2025, 27 min.) - International premiere

 

Two groups of citizens clash over the redesign of a children's playground. Is this a struggle for territorial control or ideological supremacy? Who are the true locals, and who are the foreign agents?

 

8. THIRD WORLD / TREĆI SVIJET, Arsen Oremović (Croatia, 2025, 101 min.) - World premiere

 

This is more than just a documentary film about Haustor, the legendary band from Zagreb that helped shape the music scene of the former Yugoslavia. It is also a story about creative opposites: Darko Rundek and Srđan Sacher. Through sharp observations, a reunion in a music studio, and colourful archive footage, THIRD WORLD reveals how at one moment a shared propensity for the magic of daily life brought those two creative worlds together to create a third world.

 

9. CUBA & ALASKA, Yegor Troyanovsky (Ukraine, France, Belgium, 2025, 93 min.) - Regional premiere

 

Best friends Cuba and Alaska, wisecracking medics on Ukraine’s front line, live the same battlefield story as all soldiers: the longer they stand up for Ukraine, the more their connections with friends, family, and their previous lives are interrupted and slowly get lost. With war so deeply rooted in them, can the two ever go back to the life they used to know?

 

10. DIVIA, Dmytro Hreshko (Ukraine, Poland, The Netherlands, USA, 2025, 79 min.) - Regional premiere

 

DIVIA is a meditative, sound-driven journey through a wounded land—an elemental portrait of Ukraine before, during, and beyond the full-scale invasion. Without dialogue or narration, the film unfolds as a metaphysical symphony, where landscapes bear silent testimony to destruction and quiet resilience. Ashen forests, cratered fields, and the rusting skeletons of war machines haunt the frame—each image a trace of the violence etched into the soil. Yet, even here, nature does not pause. Seasons return. Grass pushes through scorched earth. Regeneration begins—slowly, insistently.

 

11. DREAMERS: PEOPLE OF THE LIGHT / XƏYALPƏRƏSTLƏR: İŞIĞIN UŞAQLARI, Imam Hasanov (Azerbaijan, 2025, 86 min.) - Regional premiere

 

In Sheki, a remote town in Azerbaijan, former footballer Mamed dreams of organising the country’s first all-girls' football team—a bold idea in a deeply traditional community for which early marriage is the norm. The unwavering support of his wife Svetlana notwithstanding, at first Mamed’s vision seems impossible. It’s made all the stranger by the presence of two visiting space travellers, who appear keen to become involved. As local girls start their training, they face mounting resistance from a society not quite ready to embrace change. But with each practice and every game, a quiet revolution grows.

 

12. EVERYTIME YOU LEAVE, YOU ARE BORN AGAIN / SVAKI PUT KAD ODEŠ, PONOVO SE RAĐAŠ, Mladen Bundalo (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Belgium, 2025, 24 min.) - Regional premiere

 

The hypnotic, purring sound of a motor resonates, accompanied by the rumble from inside a bus. The director’s intimate voice leads us through an inner monologue. We are on our way to Prijedor, his Bosnian hometown, the site of his perpetual departures. Before arriving, we have first to understand departure as a space in which we can grow and be born again. 

 

13. I BELIEVE THE PORTRAIT SAVED ME / MUA BESOJ MË SHPËTOJ PORTRETI, Alban Muja (Kosovo*, The Netherlands, 2025, 10 min.) - Regional premiere

 

Twenty-five years after he was abducted during the Kosovo War, painter Skender Muja recalls a crucial moment of survival. Held in a detention camp, he was ordered to draw a portrait of a Serbian commander to save his life. Through reflections and re-enactments, I BELIEVE THE PORTRAIT SAVED ME explores the power of art in the face of oppression and uncertainty.

 

14. IN HELL WITH IVO, Kristina Nikolova (Bulgaria, USA, 2025, 80 min.) - Regional premiere

 

From Bulgaria, a place so conservative virtually no one is openly gay, emerges flamboyant performance artist and musician Ivo Dimchev. While he sees success all around Europe, he feels compelled to remain in his home country—the place where he is most judged. Despite being HIV-positive, he offers to perform in people’s homes when COVID hits and does so over 400 times. Rejected by his family, Dimchev invites us into his life and displays the worst of himself with no shame—embracing his narcissism, sex addiction, and confrontational nature.

 

15. MILITANTROPOS, Yelizaveta Smith, Alina Gorlova, Simon Mozgoviy (Ukraine, Austria, France, 2025, 111 min.) - Regional premiere

 

MILITANTROPOS captures the human condition through the fractured realities of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The film pieces together everyday lives transformed by war—the lives of those who flee, those who lose everything, and those who stay to resist and fight—tracing both the instinct to survive and the need for closeness. Amid devastation and atrocity, the human is absorbed into war—and war, in turn, becomes part of the human.

 

16. OUR TIME WILL COME / UNSERE ZEIT WIRD KOMMEN, Ivette Löcker (Austria, 2025, 105 min.) - Regional premiere

 

“Racism is a sickness. A sickness for the human society. A sickness that will never cure. Unless you use your power to stop it.” After years of uncertainty and involuntary exile, Siaka from Gambia and his wife Victoria have returned to their adopted “homeland” of Austria to build a stable existence and start a family. Both invest a large part of their energy in achieving their shared utopia, but cultural differences remain significant, social structures remain immobile, and their own history and traditions are just as hard to shake off. For over a year, director Ivette Löcker accompanies the couple, whose longing for carefree love and the feeling of arrival are not being fulfilled without meeting a certain amount of resistance.

 

17. THE MEN'S LAND / KACEBIS MITSA, Mariam Bakacho Khatchvani (Georgia, Hungary, 2025, 15 min.) - Regional premiere

 

In the mountains of Georgia, Ushguli custom dictates that, in the absence of a son, a family’s land must be handed down to the next male relative who will perpetuate the family name. THE MEN'S LAND follows the journey of an aspiring singer as she fights for her property in the face of dated local rules and traditions, her song becoming a bulwark against humiliation.

 

18. SLET 1988, Marta Popivoda (Serbia, Germany, France, 2025, 22 min.) - Regional premiere

Seventy-four-year-old dancer Sonja Vukićević moves through socialist-modernist spaces, her body an archive of the last mass performance in Yugoslavia. Her gestures echo past rhythms and present realities, intertwining with a teenage girl’s diary from 1988 to reveal the shift from socialist collectivism to rising individualism, while a new national collective body is creeping in and will soon shape the future of the country.

 

19. 9-MONTH CONTRACT, Ketevan Vashagashvili (Georgia, Bulgaria, Germany, 2025, 77 min.) – B&H premiere

 

In Tbilisi, Zhana, a homeless mother, resorts to surrogacy to provide a safe life for her teenage daughter, Elene. While trying to keep her pregnancies hidden from Elene, Zhana's financial struggles persist. As there are no proper regulations in place, Zhana pushes her body to extremes through a series of childbirths that take a dangerous toll on her organs and put her life at risk. As Zhana’s health declines, Elene matures and eventually confronts her mother about her choices and their consequences.

 

20. TATA, Lina Vdovîi, Radu Ciorniciuc (Romania, Germany, The Netherlands, 2024, 82 min.) – B&H premiere

 

After years of estrangement, Lina Vdovîi, a Moldovan journalist, hears from her father, a migrant worker in Italy. The message comes in the form of a video, in which he shows the bruises on his arms. Equipping him with a hidden camera so he may find justice, the director finds herself on a parallel journey, as she uncovers a pattern of domestic violence that has plagued her family for generations. Filmed across Italy, Moldova, and Romania, TATA is a raw portrait of a family locked in a relentless struggle against toxic masculinity.

 

21. OHO FILM, Damjan Kozole (Slovenia, Croatia, 2025, 93 min.) - International premiere, out of competition

 

The period from 1965 to 1971 in Slovenia—then a republic of socialist Yugoslavia—was marked by the avant-garde art movement known as the OHO Group, which has inspired and continues to inspire many artists, including Marina Abramović. OHO is regarded as one of the most fascinating, complex, and significant examples of post-war avant-garde art in Central and Eastern Europe. This documentary film, rich in never-before-seen materials, comprehensively presents this inspiring phenomenon of intertwining art and life for the first time.