Austrian Director Sandra Wollner’s ‘Everytime’ Wins Best Film at Sarajevo Film Festival
Sandra Wollner’s “Everytime” continued its winning streak at the Sarajevo Film Festival, where the Cannes Un Certain Regard winner took home the Heart of Sarajevo for best narrative feature film.
The Austrian director’s third feature was the unanimous choice of a jury headed by two-time Academy Award nominee Emily Watson, which said in its citation: “Moments of cinematic grace float through this mesmerically elastic and transcendental grief-soaked ghost story.”
“Everytime” follows a mother, young daughter and teenage boy who, united by tragedy, embark on a trip to the Canary Islands for a family holiday that never happened. Under the glow of the coastal sun, past and present begin to quietly overlap.
Following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Variety’s chief film critic Guy Lodge praised Wollner’s “poised, haunting” drama, noting that it “confirms the Austrian director’s formidable formal control and imagination, and should be her most widely distributed work to date.”
The Heart of Sarajevo for best director went to Georgian filmmaker Ana Urushadze for “Supporting Role,” another festival darling that scooped two prizes in Rotterdam earlier this year. In another unanimous choice, the jury members said they were “enchanted by [Urushadze’s] irreverent blending of the banal and the oneiric, and her refreshing curiosity for meaning in life and cinema.”
Variety’s Beatrice Loayza was likewise swept up by the “mesmerizing effect” of the director’s moody, meandering drama, which follows “a lumbering movie star on a surreal and wryly melancholic soul-search” on the streets of Tbilisi.
The award for best actress went to Eva Kostić for her lead role in “17,” the debut feature from North Macedonian director Kosara Mitić, about a teenager on a class trip wrestling with the aftermath of a sexual assault. The jury heralded her performance as “raw, visceral and deeply instinctive” and the “fearless emergence of a young talent,” adding “She brings an extraordinary emotional truth to the role, announcing the arrival of an actress with a rare and powerful voice.”
Best actor honors went to Adrian Văncică for “You Don’t Belong Here,” Romanian filmmaker Florin Şerban’s Locarno Golden Leopard winner about a respected doctor whose world is shaken when he discovers his son is a suspect in the murder of a Roma man. The jury praised Văncică “for a performance marked by tenacity and understated rigor, in which the actor consistently serves a story directed in long and wide shots.”
The Heart of Sarajevo for best documentary feature went to directing duo by Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazić for “To Hold a Mountain,” a story of sisterhood and solitude in the Montenegrin highlands. The film, which won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and the Grand Prix at Poland’s Millennium Docs Against Gravity, was hailed as “an unforgettable journey” by the documentary jury, which said in its citation: “With astonishingly epic cinematography this touching portrait of two extraordinary women and a disappearing way of life enchanted us.”
Best Director: Ana Urushadze, “Supporting Role”
Best Actor: Adrian Văncică, “You Don’t Belong Here”