Teona and Labina Mitevska Win Golden Thread at LIFFE
Sisters Teona Strugar Mitevska and Labina Mitevska receive the special Golden Thread recognition at the 19th LIFFE in Leskovac, where two of their films are screening.
At a photo call in Berlin nine years ago, two sisters from Skopje stood in front of the same wall of flashbulbs, one a director who had just finished a film, the other an actress who had played the lead in it and co-produced it besides. That partnership, which has lasted for decades and rarely splits, on screen or inside the production company the two run together, is now being honored in Leskovac.
The Artistic Council and Board of the 19th Leskovac International Film Directing Festival have decided to award Teona Strugar Mitevska and Labina Mitevska the Golden Thread, a special recognition for the affirmation of film art in the region, ex aequo. The rationale states that the award goes to the Mitevski sisters “for their exceptional and long-standing contribution to film art and to the affirmation of contemporary cinema in the region.”
The rationale goes further than the standard language of an award ceremony:
“Through years of fruitful collaboration, Teona Strugar Mitevska and Labina Mitevska have built a recognizable authorial voice, creating work that speaks, through a powerful and original film language, to universal themes deeply rooted in the region’s social reality. Their work is an important part of contemporary regional cinema, and at the same time contributes to its visibility and affirmation on the European and world stage.”
Teona Strugar Mitevska was born in 1974 in Skopje and studied film at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. From her debut short film, “Veta,” in 2001, to today, her work sits at the intersection of the personal and the political: “God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunya” (2018) and “Mother Teresa” (2025), her first English-language film. France’s Ministry of Culture named her a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2018. Labina Mitevska began her acting career as a teenager in 1993, playing Zamira in Milcho Manchevski’s “Before the Rain,” and has since taken on more than thirty roles across Europe. Together with their brother, Vuk, the sisters founded the production company Sisters and Brother Mitevski, through which they have also co-produced other directors’ work, including Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “The Wild Pear Tree.”
What the Golden Thread actually rewards is not a single film but the consistency of one authorial stance across the entire post-Yugoslav context of the region. Teona’s protagonists are almost always women colliding with an institution, a church, a bureaucracy or their own family, and Labina is the one who gives that collision a face, whether from in front of the camera or from the producer’s chair. Few duos in regional cinema divide their roles so clearly while sharing a poetics this firmly.
That comes through in their own words, too, which the festival included in its statement alongside the rationale. “Freedom of expression is our motto and our goal, without it real art cannot exist,” the Mitevski sisters said, adding that creating a space where that freedom of expression can flourish and take its true shape is regularly “not an easy task, but a necessary one.” Teona described her calling through a metaphor that speaks more to a craft than to art:
“I compare making a film to building a factory, a bridge or a cathedral. In that process, the working class, that is the proletariat, matters just as much as the creators and the decision-makers.”
Labina, for her part, reflected on how much the scene has changed since she started out:
“When we started out in film, there were only a handful of women directors in the region. Today there are hundreds of them, and that number keeps growing.”
She also thanked the festival directly: “There are very few festivals devoted exclusively to directing. Thank you for existing, LIFFE!”
The recognition will be presented to the sisters on September 15, at the opening of the 19th LIFFE at the National Theatre in Leskovac, where the festival runs through September 19. In their honor, two of their films will screen that week: “Mother Teresa” and “God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunya,” a film for which Teona Strugar Mitevska already won an award in Leskovac once before, for best directing at the 12th LIFFE in 2019. We wrote about this year’s program a few days ago, when the festival unveiled seven films that, as announced, aim squarely at alienating audiences from the movie theater. The award to the Mitevski sisters is now the first firm date that program has, and the first confirmation that the 19th LIFFE will be opened by someone whose name needs no introduction here.
