Sarajevo Film Festival opens with Pawlikowski's Fatherland

There is an unspoken agreement between Sarajevo and cinema that sets this festival apart from most European showcases: here, an opening film is not a spectacle but a question of conscience. That is why choosing Pawel Pawlikowski’s Fatherland to launch the 32nd edition reads less like a marketing move and more like a mission statement. The director who made Ida and Cold War, two of the cleanest black and white works in European auteur cinema of the last decade, arrives in Sarajevo with a story set, not by accident, in the moment when Europe was still unpacking itself from its own catastrophe.

Fatherland follows the Nobel laureate Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika through postwar Europe in 1949, a time when the question of what it meant to be German had become more troubling than any novel Mann ever wrote. Erika Mann is played by Sandra Huller, an actress we have watched over recent seasons turn moral ambiguity into a kind of craft. Even from that setup you can see Pawlikowski’s familiar gesture: vast history compressed into a single family relationship, into two faces that look at each other across a table and need to explain nothing to a viewer who knows how to read silence.

Why this film for the opening?

The answer lies partly in prizes and partly in what Sarajevo wants to be. In May, Pawlikowski won the best director award at the Cannes Film Festival for Fatherland, so the film does not arrive on the Miljacka as an unknown quantity but as an already validated, signed piece of directing. That gives the festival a weight this region rarely gets at the very start, since the world premiere circuit usually stops in Venice or Toronto, and Sarajevo receives the echoes. This time it receives the work while it is still warm.

There is a quieter logic too. A festival born under siege, as an act of defiance, rarely picks openings that are merely beautiful. Fatherland is about a writer’s responsibility to a language that has been abused, about returning to a country that once expelled you, about how a culture recovers from its own complicity. It is hard to imagine a theme closer to the post-Yugoslav context in which this festival operates, without ever being said out loud. Sarajevo knows how to choose films that speak about it precisely by not speaking about it directly.

What else this edition carries

The main competition jury for feature films is chaired by Emily Watson, an actress who once received the festival’s Honorary Heart and now returns to the other side of the table, as the one who judges. That detail is not a protocol footnote. When a festival picks as its jury president an actress whose career was defined by a willingness to play women on the edge, from Breaking the Waves to more recent roles, it says something about its own taste, that it values risk over polish.

The open question is how the competition will answer a bar set that high. Opening with a major auteur always risks making the rest of the selection feel like an accompaniment, but Sarajevo has repeatedly shown that regional cinema can withstand comparison with the European elite. The competition program, the documentaries, the short films and the CineLink industry section remain the heart of this showcase, and that is usually where discoveries are made that no red carpet announces in advance.

For audiences from this part of the world, the festival remains one of the few places where major international production and local auteur film are watched in the same hall, on the same day, with the same expectation. The only question is whether, after Fatherland, we will leave the cinema ready to talk about responsibility, or whether, as usual, we will first look for the nearest queue for the next screening. And you, what would you rather watch at the opening of a major festival, a film that comforts you or one that interrogates you?