Sarajevo Film Festival 2026
We're back on the ground for the 32nd edition, tracking the documentary competition and industry programme
Modern Times Review has covered the Sarajevo Film Festival for years, and this August we’re on the ground again, filing coverage from the industry sessions and premieres throughout its 32nd edition.
Running 14 to 21 August in the Bosnian capital, this year’s festival drew 1,215 submissions for a Competition Programme of 51 films across four sections, selected under Creative Director Izeta Građević. The documentary strand alone pulled 22 titles from 305 submissions, competing for a Heart of Sarajevo that is Oscar-qualifying and carries a €4,000 award from the Government of Switzerland.
Sarajevo Film Festival Names 22 Films for 2026 Documentary Competition opens the edition with nine world premieres and a majority-women selection, among them Metod Pevec’s Slovenian prison documentary When I Get Out, while Sarajevo Hands Human Rights Day World Premiere to All We Have Is Us gives the festival’s single annual human-rights slot to a Chilean documentary shot over five years across two lithium frontiers tied to Rio Tinto. CineLink Talks 2026 Examines Recognition and Institutional Responsibility in Film brings festival leaders and industry voices together across five panels to ask who takes responsibility for a documentary once it’s been selected. Docu Rough Cut Boutique Selects Five Projects for 2026 Edition names the year’s advanced-edit cohort, and Nobody at This Year’s Docu Rough Cut Boutique Kept Their Distance profiles all five directors ahead of their Sarajevo pitch, including Lucija Marčec, who cast her own grandmother in No Offence, and Selen Çatalyürekli, who spent years alongside the women defending Turkey’s Akbelen Forest. Slano Film Days Announces Seven Female Filmmakers Support Projects backs a new round of women-led regional cinema with production funding and access to CineLink Industry Days.
Four reviews move across this year’s selection, with more to come. When I Get Out follows a year and a half of psychodrama sessions inside Slovenia’s main male prison, where director Metod Pevec and a psychiatrist ask what shapes a criminal identity and what rehabilitation might look like from the inside. For Life enters a Palestinian woman’s attempt to smuggle her imprisoned husband’s sperm out of an Israeli jail for IVF, a practice that has produced more than 110 children in the West Bank and Gaza since 2012. Palestine ‘36 returns to the 1936 Arab revolt that historians credit with the first stirrings of a distinctly Palestinian identity, reading its land seizures and raids as a template for the present. Melt travels from Japan to Antarctica, watching farmers and glacier researchers register the same disappearance in different ways.
Read the complete Sarajevo Film Festival coverage in Modern Times Review.
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