Sandra Wollner’s Everytime has been awarded the Honorary Heart for best narrative feature film at the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival.
As this year’s edition drew to a close on Friday night, filmmakers gathered at the city’s National Theatre where the jury members — including Igor Bezinović, Sara Klimoska, Matthijs Wouter Knol and Athina Rachel Tsangari, led by Emily Watson — unveiled their top picks.
A final Honorary Heart of Sarajevo was awarded to Emir Hadžihafizbegović, one of the most prominent actors in Bosnian-Herzegovinian and regional cinema, in recognition of his contribution to film. He joined Watson, Diego Luna, Woody Harrelson and Asghar Farhadi in receiving an Honorary Heart. The festival officially closed with a screening of a restored No Man’s Land by Danis Tanović.
Austrian filmmaker Sandra Wollner and producers Lixi Frank, Viktoria Stolpe and David Bohun won the best narrative feature film award for Everytime, taking home 16,000 Euros. Led by Birgit Minichmayrhe, the film follows a mother, her young daughter and a teenage boy as they travel to Tenerife in a bid to cope with the tragic death of their eldest daughter and sister.
Wollner sat down with THR in Sarajevo to discuss taking the movie on the festival circuit. “The festival being founded during the siege in 1995, I think that’s very powerful,” she said about the Bosnian event. “And you can still feel something of that history here. I felt it yesterday when I had a radio interview. Just from some of the questions, you could get the sense that there might be a different way of approaching trauma or loss here, simply in the way people talked about the film.”
