Emir Hadzihafizbegovic Wins Heart of Sarajevo Award
Emir Hadzihafizbegovic has been awarded the Heart of Sarajevo at the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival, an honor that in recent years has mostly traveled far from the city itself.
The next to last day of the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival falls on August 20, the birthday of the man the festival has just given its Heart of Sarajevo. Emir Hadzihafizbegovic turns sixty five that day, and he will mark it in the city where he graduated and where he has spent most of his career.
The decision was announced on August 2, twelve days before the festival opens. The justification reads like the kind used on such occasions, an overall contribution to film art and memorable roles in Bosnian and regional cinema, but behind that phrasing this time sits a number that would be rare even in far larger film industries: more than 70 roles in feature films and over 100 roles across theater, film and other media.
Festival director Jovan Marjanovic explained the choice briefly in a statement:
It is a pleasure to award the Heart of Sarajevo to an artist whose body of work has marked the cinema of the community he himself came from.
There is more in that sentence than shows on first read, because it describes the festival itself as well. It too grew out of the same community, and for decades it has mostly sent its top honor across the border.
From Tuzla to Emir Kusturica’s Class
He was born on August 20, 1961, in Tuzla, where he finished elementary and high school. He graduated from the Academy of Performing Arts in Sarajevo in 1986, in Emir Kusturica’s class. His first engagement was at the National Theatre in Tuzla, and after the war he continued his artistic work in Sarajevo. He was a leading actor and longtime director of Kamerni teatar 55 (Chamber Theatre 55), and alongside that he wrote and staged four of his own theater projects, “Godine prevare,” “Iza sna,” “Tarik nije dio tala” and “Kijametski dan,” which toured stages from New York and Toronto to Paris, London, Berlin and Sydney.
That theater record is not a footnote to his film career. An actor who has walked out in front of a live audience a hundred times carries a shot differently, and it shows in his film roles, in the pacing of a line, in how long he can afford to stay silent before answering.
Roles That Carried Films, Not Decorated Them
His film arc is easiest to trace through the awards. For his role in “Takva su pravila” he won best actor in the Orizzonti program of the Venice Film Festival. He also holds a Golden Arena from Pula. He received the Andrei Tarkovsky Award in Russia, at the Zerkalo festival.
He has worked with directors Ognjen Svilicic, Rajko Grlic and Jasmila Zbanic, and the films he has appeared in have screened in Cannes, Berlin, Locarno and Rotterdam. The titles by which regional audiences recognize him mostly come down to the same handful:
- “Armin”
- “Karaula”
- “Smrt čovjeka na Balkanu”
- “Praznik rada”
- “Gori vatra”
- “Kod amidže Idriza”
- “Naša svakodnevna priča”
- “Žaba”
What connects those roles is not genre but function. For decades, Hadzihafizbegovic has played the character who holds a story together while the lead moves through it: the father, the commander, the neighbor, the man on the other side of the counter. Critics usually file such roles as supporting, yet they stay in a viewer’s memory longer than the leads do. His body of work is, among other things, proof of how imprecise that split really is.
Why Does the Heart of Sarajevo Rarely Stay in the Region?
Because the award is not only an honor, it is also programming. The list of past Heart of Sarajevo winners is a run of names who come to Sarajevo for a few days and bring foreign press with them: Angelina Jolie in 2011, Oliver Stone in 2017, Isabelle Huppert in 2019, Mads Mikkelsen in 2020, Wim Wenders in 2021. There have been domestic winners, Gavrilo Grahovac in 2006, Branko Lustig in 2012, Danis Tanovic in 2014, but they are the exception, and as a rule they receive it late, as a summary of a career rather than an invitation.
That is why this year’s choice shifts the tone. The festival is not bringing anyone in this time, it is recognizing someone who has been there all along, an actor rather than an auteur, which in the category of lifetime honors remains rarer than it should be.
What that concretely means for the 32nd edition will show in how the ceremony is staged. The Sarajevo Film Festival runs from August 14 to 21, 2026, the award has been announced, and a birthday landing in the middle of the program hands the festival material no one could have planned. If they use it right, this year’s Heart of Sarajevo will not be a formality wedged between two screenings.
