Sarajevo Film Festival 2025 - 2026

ongoing

Building upon its longstanding focus on Southeast European cinema, the Sarajevo Film Festival (SFF) each year presents a rich program of 18 sections—five of them competitive—across 15 venues and the VOD platform kinomeetingpoint.ondemand.ba. Backed by a long-lead PR campaign, SFF consistently attracts extensive media coverage from around the globe, ensuring significant visibility for emerging regional talents. A key festival pillar, CineLink Industry Days, serves as SFF’s primary industry arm, providing a comprehensive framework for project development, market access, and mentorship to Southeast European professionals. Under its Training and Skills umbrella, film practitioners benefit from workshops, labs, and networking opportunities that enable them to refine their skills. Meanwhile, traveling cinema initiatives such as Operation Kino and Dealing with the Past broaden festival engagement beyond the capital, delivering curated screenings and discussions to audience often lacking consistent access to quality cinema. SFF aims to boost overall attendance, further expand its VOD service, and enhance Southeast European content through broader regional collaborations. In 2021, the festival introduced a dedicated TV series awards segment, judged by 500 professionals in categories like Best Drama Series, Best Comedy Series, and Rising Star. Building on this success, SFF and the Network of Festivals in the Adriatic Region (NFAR)—a Creative Europe MEDIA-backed alliance of leading festivals in Montenegro, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, and North Macedonia—will inaugurate the Adriatic Film and TV Academy in October 2025, recognizing the most outstanding film and TV productions from the Former Yugoslavia. A strong environmental pledge underpins SFF’s vision: having conducted greenhouse gas emission reports, the festival intends to achieve net-zero emissions at all pop-up screening locations by 2026, harmonizing cultural leadership with ecological responsibility.