Emerging filmmakers from the Balkan region pitched their work to international industry figures at the Slano Film Days in Croatia this week.
Croatian director Bruno Anković showed footage of his debut feature Celebration, an adaptation of the novel by Damir Karakaš. The film, produced through Zagreb company Eclectica, is about a boy growing up amid poverty and cruelty before the Second World War who gradually becomes drawn to extreme right-wing ideology.
Anković, whose father was a famous professional footballer, also pitched his upcoming feature, Selection, a drama about talented 11 and 12-year-old boys dreaming of football careers facing exploitation by managers and parents.
“For many families, football presents a possibility of a better future. This is a story about what is really going on in those camps, what is really going on for those kids and their families,” the director explained. “It’s about parents who want to do their best for their children but become part of the system that hurts them and about young people trying to preserve their humanity in a culture obsessed with achievement.”
Also from Croatia, European Film Academy award-winner Igor Bezinović, whose credits include Fiume O Morte!, presented his autobiographical 2015 short, Benjamin, featuring a phone conversation with his grandmother who was suffering from memory loss. He described it as “a thing which I made in one afternoon as a coping mechanism to cope with somebody’s dementia through humour”.
Bezinović spoke of how his home city, Rjeka, Croatia’s biggest port, had “really determined my life.” He grew up there in the 1990s, when the former Yugoslavia had just broken up. “It was heavy, heavy nationalism and wartime. I grew up in a city that had a very strong alternative identity…I guess that is something that determined my whole filmmaking style.”
Serbian director Stefan Đorđević showed a clip from his debut feature, Wind Talk To Me, an autobiographical and deeply emotional docudrama about a son dealing with the loss of his mother. “It was a long process; I think it took me six years to make this film,” he said of the project, which received its world premiere at International Film Festival Rotterdam and went on to play at the Zagreb Festival and in Sarajevo.
Kosovar-Swiss director Ilir Hasanaj is in pre-production on his feature, A Worker, about workplace accidents. He revealed the project was partly sparked by an accident he witnessed a decade ago when he was editing a previous film and saw a worker falling from a height. “When I went to get something to eat, I just saw this man lying on the ground. Everybody had to wait for the emergency services to come. What was really bad was that it was midday and all the streets [were] full.”
From Slovenia, Ester Ivakič, who has a background in experimental film, showed a scene from her 2025 debut feature, Ida Who Sang So Badly Even The Dead Rose Up And Joined Her in Song, about a young girl growing up in a rural community who is obsessed with preventing the death of her grandmother.
“She thinks she is going to fix it with singing, but she is a very bad singer,” Ivakič explained.
The feature, adapted from the novel by Suzana Tratnik, won awards at the Cottbus and Torino development labs last year. It was co-scripted by Ivakič and Nika Jurman. “While we were developing the script, we found so much of our lives in the book as well because I[for us] there was a lot of childhood loneliness,” says Tratnik. “It was so strange because our lives became more and more connected with the book, with the story, a lot of pain, a lot of dreams and a lot of also humorous stuff.”
Montenegrin director Sara Stijović is in pre-production on the creative documentary The Thirteenth Fish which “deals with the phenomenon of the daughter-in-law in Montenegrin society.” She is also developing a mini-series, Pray For Us.
In Slano, she screened a clip from her upcoming short, Sourdough, now in post-production and backed by the Montenegrin Film Centre. The film follows two kids, an 11-year-old girl and a six-year-old boy, first seen playing at the beach as a storm approaches. They’re shown preparing sourdough while watching a TV quiz show, but there is a sense “something is off. as the girl tries to protect her brother from something.
North Macedonian director Georgi Malinski played a scene from his debut feature, Dj Ahmet, which premiered at Sundance last year, winning a special jury prize and an audience award. ‘I became a director purely by accident. It was never the plan,” the New York-born Malinski commented dryly before adding that it is now “all I know how to do.”
Slano Film Days is taking place this week from June 16-20 in Croatia, as part of the talent development work of the Sarajevo Film Festival.
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