Talents Sarajevo Unveils Mentorship Lineup for its Twentieth Edition

Fifty young film professionals from 14 countries have been confirmed for this year’s Talents Sarajevo, joining eight specialised labs: Acting Studio, Directors Summit, Script Station, Camera Studio, Producers Summit, Editing Studio, Talent Press, and Pack & Pitch.

This year’s programme unfolds under the theme Reality, Rewritten, which treats filmmaking not as a straight line from idea to screen but as an ongoing negotiation, one in which a story’s core has to survive contact with everyone who works on it. Whether the starting point is memory, documentary material, or a page of dialogue, meaning is not fixed in advance; it takes shape through the concrete choices made at each stage, in framing, performance, sound, and edit. Each lab is led by a mentor whose own career has moved through exactly that kind of negotiation, and who now guides participants through it in turn, from holding a set together, to defending a voice inside a shared writers’ room, to arguing a project’s worth in a final pitch. This year’s mentorship lineup brings together leading voices from across the industry, each guiding one of our labs.

Croatian actor Goran Bogdan leads the Acting Studio this year, bringing a career that moves comfortably between festival prestige and mainstream visibility. His credits include FARGO, FATHER, and THE MAN WHO COULD NOT REMAIN SILENT, winner of the 2024 Palme d’Or for Best Short and an Academy Award nominee, alongside a body of work built across regional television and international productions. That range, between festival recognition and everyday screen work, gives him a grounded sense of what performers actually need: how to hold a role together under pressure, and how to carry a performance from a small regional set into a much larger international frame.

The Directors Summit continues under its One Day from Competition format, pairing participants with filmmakers whose work is screening in this year's Competition Programme. Sessions with Urša Menart (EVERYTHING THAT'S WRONG WITH YOU), Blerta Basholli (DUA), Dina Duma (SKATEBOARDING IS NOT FOR GIRLS), Visar Morina (SHAME AND MONEY), and Ana Urushadze (SUPPORTING ROLE) give participants direct access to directors mid-festival, addressing questions of set leadership and how to sustain a vision across the length of a production. From the In Focus selection, the group will also be joined by Konstantina Kotzamani, whose debut feature TITANIC OCEAN premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes this year, alongside Juraj Lerotić, whose SAFE PLACE won the Heart of Sarajevo in 2022, and Srdan Golubović, whose FATHER won both the Audience Award and the Ecumenical Jury Award at the Berlinale. The group will also meet with Andrea Štaka, whose MARE premiered in Panorama at the Berlinale before screening in Competition at Sarajevo Film Festival, and who serves as a member of this year's Gender Equality Jury.

The Script Station’s Writers’ Room is once more in the hands of Isaure Pisani-Ferry and Matija Dragojević, a format built around shared development rather than competing pitches. Pisani-Ferry co-created BECOMING KARL LAGERFELD for Disney+ and VAMPIRES for Netflix, credits that sit squarely inside the serialised, multi-writer development world the lab is built to teach. Dragojević co-wrote the Canneseries-winning AWAKE, bringing a regional counterpoint to that same set of skills. Between them, they offer a working understanding of how a story gets shaped once it stops being one person’s material and starts being negotiated in a room, and how a writer keeps hold of their own voice through that process.

The Camera Studio welcomes Bosnian cinematographer Erol Zubčević, whose work moves between documentary immediacy and considered visual composition. A graduate of the Film Camera Department at HFF München, where he trained under Michael Ballhaus, and a lecturer in Film Photography at the Academy of Performing Arts Sarajevo, Zubčević has shot several of the region’s most internationally recognised titles, including Aida Begić’s SNOW (Grand Prix, Cannes Critics’ Week) and CHILDREN OF SARAJEVO (Cannes), as well as Danis Tanović’s AN EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF AN IRON PICKER (Silver Bear, Berlinale). His mentorship treats the camera as an act of empathy, not merely a technical instrument, and asks participants to think about what a frame owes to the people inside it.

Katriel Schory is back at the Producers Summit this year, bringing the perspective of someone who has shepherded more than 250 films into production over the course of his career, many of them international co-productions carried through complex funding structures. Schory’s mentorship treats the producer as both enabler and gatekeeper, someone who has to hold a project’s artistic ambitions and its financial reality in the same hand. His sessions focus less on theory than on the practical mechanics of keeping a production sustainable, from the first financing conversation through to delivery.

Redžinald Šimek keeps his place at the head of the Editing Studio, a role he has held since 2017. His career began as a sound engineer at the Radio of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the mid-1990s, before he moved through video editing and motion design at Fabrika and SCCA/Pro.ba, and into freelance editing and post-production supervision from 2009 onward. He has edited several of Danis Tanović’s films, among them DEATH IN SARAJEVO, alongside work for Aida Begić, Pjer Žalica, and Ines Tanović. 

Talent Press, the lab for emerging critics and journalists, stays under the guidance of Neil Young. His writing has appeared in The Hollywood Reporter, Sight & Sound, and Screen, and he has served on juries at Cannes, Berlinale, and Venice, giving him a working view of festival cinema from both sides of the aisle. His sessions focus on what responsible criticism looks like in an industry where discourse now moves faster than the films it covers, pushing participants to write with speed and clarity without losing the judgment that separates criticism from commentary.

Pack & Pitch, the lab focused on packaging and presenting a project to the industry, is once again co-mentored by Gabriele Brunnenmeyer and Nicholas Davies. Brunnenmeyer has worked across Europe’s major development labs, including Midpoint and Rendez-Vous Industry Cannes, giving her a close view of how projects get built for the market. Davies is a cultural strategist and editor who has collaborated with the Venice Biennale and the Toronto International Film Festival, bringing a broader curatorial perspective to the same table. Together, their sessions carry participants from early development through to a final pitch for a competitive award.

Talents Sarajevo is a joint initiative of the Sarajevo Film Festival, the Berlin International Film Festival, and Berlinale Talents, now marking its twentieth year of matching emerging filmmakers with people actively shaping the industry around them.

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

Talents Sarajevo is supported by Creative Europe MEDIA program.