Mountain They Defended Now Opens Sarajevo

The documentary Mountain took seven years to make, from 2018 to 2025, with the crew returning every summer to the same katun on Sinjajevina, in Okrugljak and the surrounding area. It has its regional premiere on August 15 at 15:30, in Cineplexx 1, and that screening opens the documentary competition of the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival.

Opening the documentary competition is not a slot handed out of politeness toward the region. It is the screening from which audiences and juries calibrate the rest of the program, and Mountain arrives in Sarajevo with a résumé that a regional documentary rarely builds in a single season. At this year’s Sundance it won the Grand Jury Prize for best international documentary, its European premiere came in March at the Copenhagen documentary film festival, and that same month it screened in Paris at Cinéma du Réel, in the Special Screenings selection that brings together new work from prominent filmmakers worldwide. So far it has played at 18 international festivals and picked up six awards, including best documentary in Minneapolis and the Grand Prix of the Millennium Docs Against Gravity festival.

The film is credited to Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazić, who wrote and directed it together. Eva Kraljević is the cinematographer, George Cragg edited the film, Draško Adžić composed the original score, and Julij Zornik is the sound designer. It is a coproduction of Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia and Slovenia, made with support from regional film centers, French funds and Eurimages.

Ahead of the Sarajevo premiere, Tutorov noted that the festival had already marked a starting point for her once before, the same year work on Mountain began.

“I’m looking forward to the Sarajevo Film Festival, and it’s an honor that our film is the one opening the documentary program. That’s where I celebrated the premiere of my first film, the same year we were about to start working on ‘Mountain.’ I still remember the full hall and the applause of the Sarajevo audience. The circle is closing. It’s wonderful that the heart of our crew will come together again in Sarajevo. We worked on this project for seven years, and I’m excited that we finally have the chance to present the film to colleagues and audiences from the region. I love this film, it’s exactly what we felt it should be, but I’m always a little nervous about how it will go. From the premiere in January until now, every audience in different countries around the world has let us feel something we hadn’t felt before, has lit up the film in a new way through the prism of its own culture, has brought out another layer of the story, and that experience is priceless for us as filmmakers. For the first time, I’m watching an audience in a way continue or finish the ‘work’ on the film. I can’t wait to see how it’s received at SFF.”

What she describes as the audience finishing the film in the hall has a practical side too: a documentary already seen in the United States, Denmark and France is, for the first time, facing an audience that knows Sinjajevina as a place, not a landscape.

Glomazić placed the same premiere within the geography of the coproduction.

“I’m very happy that our film will be shown at the film festival in Sarajevo, which has been an extremely important cultural event and celebration of film ever since it was founded during the siege, not just for us but for Europe and the world. This film is an international coproduction, and among the coproducing countries are four former republics of the SFRY: Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia and Slovenia. I can’t imagine a more beautiful place for the regional premiere of ‘Mountain’ than Sarajevo, and I believe our film will be just as close to audiences here, and elsewhere in our region, as it was in Montenegro, where it was shot.”

What happened on Sinjajevina before the cameras arrived?

Sinjajevina is the largest pasture area in the Balkans and has been used for summer grazing for centuries. In September 2019 it hosted the first international military exercise held there, in the middle of the pastures and without prior consultation with the livestock communities that use the land. The film grew out of that clash.

At its center are two protagonists. Mileva Gara Jovanović, a mother of six and the leader of the local community’s fight to protect the mountain, and her youngest daughter, Nada, who is thirteen in the film. Their relationship carries both affection and old family scars, so the documentary follows two battles at once: an ecological one, against a military range in the heart of the pasture, and a personal one, in which mother and daughter confront patriarchy and violence against women. Hence the title works on two levels: the mountain is both the terrain and the thing being defended.

Eleven films from Serbia in Sarajevo

Mountain is one of 13 films competing for the Heart of Sarajevo award for best feature documentary. Serbia has 11 works in total across different selections at this year’s festival, which runs from August 14 to 21:

• in the main competition, three minority coproductions: “Everything That’s Wrong With You,” “Small Things” and “17”
• in the documentary competition, alongside Mountain, “Forbidden Aunt,” having its world premiere, and “Dear Orchid”
• out of competition, the documentary “Jugo Goes to America”
• in the student program, “Neighbor” and “Sisters,” both world premieres, and “Over the Threshold,” a regional premiere
• in the short fiction program, “No One Said Anything”

Selectors received 1,215 film submissions for this year’s edition, and 51 titles made it into the four competition selections. The number matters for proportion: out of that pile of submissions, eleven Serbian films made the cut, and one of them was given the slot that opens the program.

For a documentary shot at a katun, built around two women nobody cast as heroines, that is the most serious kind of confirmation the region can give.