The BÉLA TARR IN SARAJEVO Tribute

Films in the Programme:

Japan, Mexico, 2019, 75 min.

Director: Kaori Oda

 

Cenotes—sources of water that in ancient Mayan civilization were said to connect the real world and the afterlife. The past and present of the people living in and around them intersect, and distant memories echo throughout immersive scenes of light and darkness. 

 

Spain, Portugal, 2025, 17 min.

Director: Manel Raga Raga

Cast: Vasile  Burtic, Manuel Raga Raga

 

In my grandparents’ home, all the clocks are stopped. 

 

Iceland, Sweden, Poland, 2021, 106 min.

Director: Valdimar Jóhannsson

Cast: Noomi Rapace, Hilmir Snær Guðnason, Björn Hlynur Haraldsson, Ingvar Sigurðsson

 

A childless couple in rural Iceland make an alarming discovery one day in their sheep barn. They soon face the consequences of defying the will of nature in this dark and atmospheric folktale. 

 

Poland, Mexico, USA, 2022, 84 min.

Director: Bianca Lucas

Cast: John Dicks, TJ Tarver, Becca Begnaud, Corinne Bordelon, Brooke Keel Bullock, Ernie Schaeffer

 

After finishing a job on a Texas oil rig, John returns to his hometown in Mississippi, where he will confront not only his own repressed trauma, but that of a society grieving dying American myths. 

 

Spain, 2022, 120 min.

Director: Pilar Palomero

Cast: Carla Quílez, Ángela Cervantes, Rubén Martínez, Pepe Lorente, Jordan Dumes, Olga Hueso, Gal-la Sabasté, Neus Pàmies

 

At the age of fourteen, Carla is wild and rebellious. Living in a modest restaurant on the outskirts of town with her young single mother, she skips school and passes the time with her friend Efraín. When a social worker realizes Carla is five months pregnant, she is taken to La Maternal, a centre for teenage mothers, to live with other young women like herself. Together with their babies, they will learn to cope with a new adult life for which they have had no time to prepare.

 

United Kingdom, 2022, 12 min.

Director: Grant Gulczynski

Cast: Luis Amália

 

A filmmaker has low self-esteem. He hires an actor to play himself, a filmmaker with low self-esteem, making a gay film about sex, the body, and himself, inspired by the filmmaker’s sex, body, and self. 

 

Serbia, North Macedonia, 2025, 77 min.

Director: Stefan Malešević

 

In the North Macedonian village of Kanatlar, Ayten and Erdoğan raise their children, balancing the eight-hundred-year-old Bektashi Sufi teachings with the struggles of modern life. In this tobacco-growing valley, a Turkish Muslim community devoted to faith, family, and tradition allows gender equality to flourish quietly, rooted in the belief that all beings are equal.

 

France, 2025, 22 min.

Director: Léa Triboulet

 

The filmmaker unexpectedly came upon the bridge where her mother died and decided to confront this place with her camera. The process of filming and editing became one of observation, contemplation, and confrontation. Her mother inhabits every landscape she films. Does a place not retain any memory of what happened there? 

 

Mexico, 2021, 108 min.

Director: Sergio Flores Thorija

Cast: Alejadra Carrillo, Victor García, Jaqueline Coronel, Jonathan Durán, José Sampeiro,  Trapitilian, Daniel López

 

Alejandra and Víctor come from completely different backgrounds, and live in a city that is artificially divided by a wall: Tijuana and San Diego. She works putting nails in a beauty salon, while he studies business and is starting his own company. Following a phone call and an altercation in a club, the two have to embark on a journey to the other side of their respective borders. In this way, very soon it becomes evident how those kilometres of distance between their places of origin, sentence the way in which both face their lives. 

 

Serbia, Belgium, 2019, 80 min.

Director: Marina Radmilac

Cast: Strike  Lucicky, Denis  Lavant, George Ilich, Marija  Šević, Lidija  Andonov, Dušan  Vesić, Sofia  Dimich

 

WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU is a black-and-white psyhodelic punk drama about one man, one city, one madness. Alexander is an expat returning from the Brussels to Belgrade for the restitution of his family's property and with the intent of making an opera based on Shakespeare's Richard III. While trying to mend his strained relationship with his older brother, he pursues the project with maniacal determination all while going from bar to bar, rediscovering the charm of the city and its women and shooting his memories with a Super 8 camera. As pressure mounts, so does his obsession with his anarchist psychiatrist as he faces mental breakdown. 

The 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival will take place from 14 to 21 August 2026.