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Winner of the DAFilms.com Distribution Award following its Docu Talents from the East pitch this week, Romanian Tudor Platon’s highly personal new doc will explore “the different shapes that love can take between parents and children, and children who become parents themselves.” Producer Carla Fotea (who is also a crucial onscreen presence in the film) pitched the project in Sarajevo.

Berlin-based producer Loránd Balázs Imre and Hungarian director András Földes (also a conflict zone reporter whose work has garnered him a Pulitzer Memorial Prize) pitched their new doc, which addresses the dire threat to press freedom in contemporary Hungary. “I aim to create a powerful and emotionally resonant film about the struggle between autocratic forces and human groups committed to freedom,” Földes explains.

In their debut feature doc My Muslim Husband the filmmakers, a married couple, turn their camera on themselves. “In the beginning, I thought it was going to be easy. We would film something and then we would have a movie. That was not the case. It was much more complicated,” Lizeta observes to BDE of what turned out to be a deeply personal and complex affair.

When, 12 years ago, Goran Dević turned up at a railway station in the Balkans to start filming a bitter strike, he thought he was simply doing research for a fiction script. Little did he know it would turn into a feature doc selected for Sarajevo Doc Competition. “They opened themselves to me from the first moment they saw me,” Dević remembers of the union leaders he got to know. “After that, I stayed with them.”

Five new projects were pitched August 14 during Cinelink’s Docu Rough Cut Boutique, the regional platform dedicated to upcoming documentaries at advanced editing stage. Organised in three modules (Budapest, Sofia, and Sarajevo) the projects compete for a slew of cash and in-kind prizes. “There are so many interesting and relevant stories to be told, and the world wants to know these stories,” programme head Rada Sešic told BDE.

The $5000 Docu Talent Award was split between the Ukrainian A Picture to Remember and the Czech-Slovak co-production Chronicle. The DAFilms.com Distribution Award was awarded to An Almost Perfect Family by Romanian director Tudor Platon. During the August 13 pitch event, Ji.hlava IDFF also announced the participants within the Emerging Producers 2024 programme and unveiled its East West Index 2023.

Two days after receiving the Heart of Sarajevo Award, the prolific Northern Irish/Scottish director gave a masterclass August 13 during which he addressed a panoply of subjects, among them his upbringing in Belfast during the Troubles, working from the margins, his filming method, the poetry of cinema and turning shyness into a superpower. He was in conversation with Bulgarian academic Dina Iordanova.

“I was lucky to meet these amazing people who opened their lives to me, their personalities and their universe,” director Giorgi Parkosadze tells BDE of Guri and his mother Sanata, living in a remote mountainous gorge in Georgia and the subjects of the documentary Requiem to the Hot Days of Summer, screening in Sarajevo’s Documentary Competition.

For Sarajevo-born Miroslav Mandic, nature doesn't exist merely to be exploited by the human species. Because when it is, it has a tendency to bite back - with tsunamis, earthquakes or pandemics. In his short film Hug, nature is in the ascendant, its beauty, power and subtlety revealed against a dramatic soundscape which itself finds counterpoint within a dynamic modernist score. The director explains his rationale to Business Doc Europe.

“Kiss the future!” rock star Bono of band U2 shouted at the crowd during the historic concert in Sarajevo in 1997. The city was then emerging from siege and war. It was time, the Irishman was telling them, to look forward after the years of horror. The story behind the concert, and how it happened, is told in the feature doc directed by Nenad Cicin-Sain and written by Bill S Carter, who speaks to Business Doc Europe.