Serbian filmmaker Emilija Gašić’s Wolf Days won the €20,000 Eurimages co-production development award at this year’ CineLink Industry Days awards, which took place last night (August 20) at the Sarajevo Film Festival.
Wolf Days is produced by Serbia’s Non-Aligned Films, with US-based Istok Films and Croatia’s Restart and tells the story of a middle-aged administrative clerk from a small Serbian town who struggles with symptoms of menopause. Dismissed by her doctors, she seeks the help of a folk healer who claims she is cursed.
The project also took part in TorinoFilmLab. The production is budgeted at €1.1m, with €80,000 in place before CineLink. It is in development and plans to shoot in November 2027. Gašić’s debut feature, 78 Days, made its world premiere at Rotterdam in 2024.
Scroll down for full list of winners
Ukraine’s Oleksandr Roshchyn won the Eurimages special co-production development award, also worth €20,000, for Mamayi. It is the cinematographer’s debut as a feature director. Set in Ukraine in autumn 2009, it follows two TV reporters forced into a dirty election campaign for a pro-Russian candidate. Viktor Shevchenkoproduces produces for Packgauz.
The film is budgeted at €1.9m with €10,000 in place before CineLink, and hopes to shoot in October of this year.
Among the work-in-progress winners was Croatia’s Filip Mojzeš, who received the €30,000 HBO award for The First Week In August, produced by Croatia’s Wolfgang & Dolly and Poland’s Black Photon. On a Mediterranean getaway, a mother’s sudden physical outburst at her 10-year-old son cracks open latent family tension. The project is also taking part in San Sebastian’s WIP Europa showcase in September.
The documentary awards, announced earlier in the week, included two prizes for Bulgarian doc Where Shall We Go? from filmmakers Maria Cheresheva and Georgi Totev, which received the Avanpost award worth €20,000 for in kind post-production services and the €2,000 HBO award. A disillusioned Jewish peace activist retreats to her home in rural Bulgaria, finding an unlikely lifeline in a long-distance friendship with a Gazan woman fighting to keep her family alive.
Attendees reactions
International sales agents, buyers and festival programmers who attended told Screen they were particularly impressed by the diversity of projects showcased this year at CineLink.
”The Sarajevo Film Festival has a unique feel: both intimate and dense,” said Denis Leroy, the France-based senior director of the scripted division at Banijay. ”The passion and resilience that all professionals of the southeast region must have to keep financing and producing in such an uncertain and challenging ecosystem contributes to that.”
Leroy’s standout features were Urska Djukic Lecamus’s Little Trouble Girls follow-up Forbidden Fruit, which won the Artekino International prize, and Elena Mikaberidze’s The Taste Of The Peach, about a young Belgian-Georgian woman caught between conflicting identities as the Georgian government aligns more closely with Russia, and won the Next Step Studio CineLink and Kosovo Cinematography Centre CineLink awards.
At the documentary pitches, buzz was building around Dzhovani Gospodinov’s German monastery-set Ore Et Labora, which won the Ji.hlava Docu Talent award for most promising project at the festival, Lucija Marčec’s No Offence, which follows community tensions in a small Croatian village between Croatians, Roma and Nepalese food industry workers, and Slovakian director Sára Prokopová’s Retuning, which won the Ji.hlava Docu Talent distribution award, and follows the fallout from Slovakia’s 2024 political shift.
“In a world that feels increasingly chaotic and frankly, a little bananas, I think there is something very appealing about a film [Ore Et Labora] that opens a window onto spirituality, community and the search for meaning,” said Tijana Djukic, head of sales and acquisitions at France’s Stranger Film Sales.
She also noted, “No Offence is very funny and universal, and although it is rooted in a very specific local context, I hope its humour can travel internationally.”
“The project I thought had the strongest potential was Retuning,” said Murtada Elfadl, DOC NYC programmer. “Its subject, an attack on public media by the populist government there, feels both like a compelling local story and a universal one, with similar situations unfolding in other countries, including the US.
“I always find Sarajevo to be a necessary link for my US-based curation work with Balkan and Eastern European documentary filmmakers,” Elfadi continued. ”CineLink Industry Days consistently brings together both established and emerging documentarians from the region, which I find valuable for US festivals seeking to broaden their global lens.”
CineLink Industry Days 2026 winners
Co-Production Market
- Eurimages Co-Production Development award – Wolf Days (Ser-US-Cro) dir. Emilija Gašić; prod. Dragana Jovović
- Eurimages Special Co-Production Development award – Mamayi (Ukr) dir. Oleksandr Roshchyn; prod. Viktor Shevchenko
- Film Centre Montenegro CineLink award – How To Disappear In The Lake (Turkey) dir. Selcen Ergun; prods. Diloy Gülün, Selcen Ergun
- Kosovo Cinematography Centre CineLink award – The Taste Of The Peach (N Mac-Belg-Geo) dir. Elena Mikaberidze; prod. Labina Mitevska
- Artekino International prize – Forbidden Fruit (Slovenia-Greece) dir. Urška Djukić Lecamus; prod. Luka Peterca
- Next Step Studio CineLink award – Elena Mikaberidze (Geo), for The Taste Of The Peach
CineLink Co-Production Market & CineLink Drama
- Female Voices CineLink award – Little Yugoslavia (N Mac-Belg) cres. Teona Strugar Mitevska, Sonja Prosenc; prod. Labina Mitevska
CineLink Drama
- Croatian Audiovisual Centre Drama award – You Can Always Come Back (Cro) cre. Tena Gojić; writ. Hana Jušić; prods. Pipser, Dinaridi Film
- TV Drama Vision Pitch award – Stringers (Cro) cre./writ. Nikola Kuprešanin; dir. Danis Tanović; prod. Siniša Juričić
CineLink Work in Progress awards
- HBO award – The First Week Of August (Cro-Pol) dir. Filip Mojzeš; prods. Tamara Babun Zovko, Matija Drniković
- Post Republic award – The White Week (Ser-Cro-Slovenia-Mont) dir. Bojan Vuletić; prods. Jelena Mitrović, Boris T. Matić, Lana Matić, Danijel Hočevar, Ivan Đurović
- Avanpost Media award – Pay The Bill (Kazakhstan-Saudi) dir. Assel Aushakimova; prod. Assel Yerzhanova
Docu Rough Cut Boutique awards
- HBO award – Where Shall We Go? (Bul) dirs. Maria Cheresheva, Georgi Totev; prods. Svetoslav Draganov, Georgi Totev
- Avanpost award – Where Shall We Go? (Bul) dirs. Maria Cheresheva, Georgi Totev; prods. Svetoslav Draganov, Georgi Totev
- Dok Leipzig Preview award – Kind Of Adults (Hun) dirs. Peter Akar, Rita Balogh; prod. Rita Balogh
- Movies That Matter award – Women Of Akbelen Forest (Turkey) dir. Selen Çatalyürekli; prod. Zeyneb Gültekin
- East Doc Caravan award – Kind Of Adults (Hun) dirs. Peter Akar, Rita Balogh; prod. Rita Balogh
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