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.”
