Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa will receive the honorary Heart of Sarajevo award at the opening ceremony of the 28th Sarajevo Film Festival, which runs from August 12 to 19 this year.
Loznitsa will attend the event to accept his award. The festival will also host a retrospective of his work, with five features and three short films from his back catalogue.
These will include a director’s cut of Reflections, the short which he directed for 2014 anthology feature Bridges Of Sarajevo.
Kyiv-born Loznitsa’s debut feature My Joy premiered in Competition at Cannes 2010, with the festival also screening his subsequent works The Fog in 2012, A Gentle Creature in 2017, and Donbass, which won Loznitsa the best director prize in Un Certain Regard in 2018.
He has also made multiple feature documentaries, including another Cannes premiere: 2014’s Maidan, about the Euromaidan movement in the Ukrainian capital in 2013 and 2014.
Loznitsa was one of a group of Ukrainian filmmakers to appeal for peace in the country shortly before the major Russian invasion in late February.
Shortly after the invasion, he resigned from the European Film Academy due to its response to the war, publishing an open letter in Screen International.
He remains a divisive figure in both the Ukrainian and wider European film scene, and was expelled from the Ukrainian Film Academy in March due to “the narratives [he] tells about Ukraine,” according to Academy executive director Anna Machukh.
Loznitsa responded that he was “astonished” at his expulsion, adding “I am and always will be a Ukrainian filmmaker.”
He is the second Sarajevo honorary guest announced this week, after US filmmaker Paul Schrader.
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