Emily Watson to Lead Sarajevo Film Festival Jury

There is a shot in Lars von Trier’s “Breaking the Waves” in which Emily Watson looks straight into the camera, without makeup and without cover, and that gaze from three decades ago is probably the reason her name at the head of a jury sounds like a promise rather than a protocol gesture. This year the Sarajevo Film Festival names her exactly that, president of the feature film competition jury, and pairs the role with an Honorary Heart of Sarajevo, an award this festival does not hand out lightly.

This is the 32nd edition, running from August 14 to 21, in that part of the calendar when the regional festival circuit finally turns toward Sarajevo, after Cannes and before the big autumn showcases. Watson holds together a range few can, from the raw intimacy of von Trier, through “Requiem for a Dream” and “Angels in America”, to the television “Chernobyl”, where she played the conscience of the entire series. Such a biographical arc lends her chairmanship a weight that is not measured by the red carpet.

Why Watson and Farhadi in the same year?

The answer lies in what the festival is trying to say about its own taste. Alongside Watson, the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo also goes to Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian director whose “A Separation” and “The Salesman” brought two Oscars and, more importantly, a recognizable moral unease in which there are no clean culprits and no innocent victims. His retrospective is arranged so that audiences can trace how that directorial poetics was built film by film, from chamber family dramas to stories that split at the ethical seams under pressure.

Placing Watson and Farhadi in the same program is no accident. Both belong to that kind of author and performer who would rather pose a question than offer an answer, and that common denominator says more about the festival’s editorial intent than any official statement. Sarajevo, it seems, is again positioning itself as a place where film is watched seriously, with no need to excuse glamour with art or the other way around.

Beside its president, the jury includes director Igor Bezinovic, actress Sara Klimoska, film curator Mathijs Wouter Knol and director Athina Rachel Tsangari, a lineup that covers both a regional and a wider European sensibility. Their task is a thankless one: the Sarajevo competition traditionally mixes established names with debutants from the region, so the decision on the Heart of Sarajevo for best film is always a small statement about where local cinema ought to be heading.

What the opening film says about its direction

The festival opens with “Fatherland” by Pawel Pawlikowski, the Polish director who, with “Ida” and “Cold War”, showed that black-and-white images and silence can carry an entire historical burden. This time he turns to Thomas Mann, a Nobel laureate whose life is dramatic material in itself, caught between European culture and its collapse. Opening with such a film is not a neutral choice, because the festival is announcing that it intends to deal with a past that refuses to pass.

What remains to be seen is how that serious tone will hold across a week of screenings, guests and, inevitably, festival bustle. Sarajevo learned long ago to join solemnity with lightness, but the combination of Watson, Farhadi and Pawlikowski sets the bar high even before the lights go down in the first hall. Will this year’s winner justify the company it finds itself in, or will the festival, as usual, surprise us with a name we are not yet saying aloud?