Best Bosnian documentary movies

In 1994, Sarajevo was a city under siege. Mortars and rocket propelled grenades rained onto the city, killing indiscriminately, every day. Amongst the madness, two United Nations personnel: a British military officer and another Brit working for the UN Fire Department, decided it would be fun to persuade a global rock star, Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden, to come and play a gig to the population. Scream for Me Sarajevo brings that story, in all its madness, to the big screen. A story of musicians who risked their lives to play a gig to people who risked their lives to live them.

Follows an elderly man living in isolation, weaving together a tapestry of dreamlike visuals as it records the routines of his daily life. Surrounding mountains, a burning stove and animal companions offer solace and warmth.

A space in silence, where past has captured present. Taking over, layer by layer, the collective pain enters the landscape, the space, the city. Eventually, it enters us. Srebrenica becomes a reality of today, and our own reality.

Five stories that tell how a handful of football stars took the risk of losing everything and put their fate in the balance to make a difference by becoming the symbol of a fight.

An uncommon motorcycle club led by Bosnian War veterans finds redemption helping their struggling small town heal and defending the threatened herd of wild horses they first met on the front line.

In a train from Sarajevo to Zagreb, looking at the landscape of the foreign country from a window, I somehow felt nostalgic and a question crossed my mind. “What is my first memory?” Could primitive memories be found and shared in human beings? If collective memories exist in us as what is inherited, I would like to know what it is like and to capture them by camera and sound recorder.

During the Balkan conflict (1991-2001), between 25,000 and 50,000 women were victims of sexual violence as an ethnic cleansing strategy. However, there is no official figure because many of the victims either did not survive or they now live in silence. This documentary shows the witnesses and their struggle to break the silence and overcome the stigma in a society that still suffers the consequences of war, 25 years later.

"Toni Kukoč - The Magical Seven" is about a young man from Split who, with his basketball knowledge, professionalism and unique style of play, won the basketball world in the late 1980s and 1990s. In those years, Toni Kukoč became Europe's most popular basketball player and was also officially voted the best player of the old continent four times. The journey from Split, from elementary school to winning an NBA ring and sharing the locker room with the greatest basketball player of all time, Michael Jordan, is a story about growing up, fellowship, and socializing with generations that only knew about winning during those years. He played and won Olympic medals for two countries, Yugoslavia and Croatia. Regardless of his incredible sports results, what sets Toni Kukoč apart is his behavior off the field, his modesty and his sincerity.

In Zenica, a giant steel factory belches toxic gasses into the air day and night, making the city one of the world’s most polluted, and people are dying. Samir Lemes and citizen activists from Eko Forum fight an uneven fight for change against the reckless corporation, the local politicians who focus on jobs, investments, and re-elections, and the EU who co-funds the corporation without enforcing laws and international standards. Instead, they name Zenica ‘A Green City Project’, building bicycle lanes in a city where breathing is a health hazard. A film about financial cynicism, political pragmatisk and greenwashing, in which West European countries play a surprisingly big role.

"Looking for Horses" is a film about a friendship between the filmmaker and a fisherman, who lost his hearing during the Bosnian civil war and retreated to a lake to live in solitude. The filmmaker, son of Bosnian parents, struggles to communicate as he lost his mother-tongue due to a heavy stutter. Despite their speech and hearing limitations, a bond develops between the young man and the veteran, as he shares his world of the lake: full of large catfish, wild horses, wide silences, and dangerous thunderstorms. Where for the fisherman the lake stands for a withdrawal from a fractured country, a land of war; for the filmmaker it precisely means the return to that broken place, the land of his parents. They look for ways to communicate, while the camera mediates their growing bond. Taking the shape of a gentle western, "Looking for Horses" is a poetic documentary on trauma, survival, and connection.

The film is dedicated to the struggles that lasted from June 24 to October 6, 1992, when the Banja Luka-Bijeljina corridor was liberated. Operation “Corridor” meant life for the population of both Krajinas – the supply of food, electricity and medicine was re-established.

The Land is a haunted place between the two worlds; living and dead, where history and mythology converge. This territory named Krajina which means 'frontier' or ' the edge', is the land given by the Habsburg emperor in 17th century to the Serbian refugees from all over the Balkans to settle down and defend the border from the Ottoman empire. Today, formally the part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, this land is still the imaginary line between the two civilizations, between east and west. It is a bewitched space, a dystopian universe where the ghosts return from all the past battles.

Mira Furlan plays the voice of Sava. Once the longest river in Yugoslavia she converses with her people on a 990km odyssey downstream through divided lands she seeks to understand.

A documentary about favorite shopping destination for Yugoslavs: Trieste in Italy.

Thirteen European directors explore the theme of Sarajevo; what this city has represented in European history over the past hundred years, and what Sarajevo stands for today in Europe. These eminent filmmakers of different generations and origins offer exceptional singular styles and visions.

Gorani people live in Gora, in the south of Kosovo. They are Muslims who speak a Slavic language. Throughout the years they were always used for political games of power between the surrounding nations (Serbs, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Albanians, Bosnians...). This is the first film that deals with the way these people are, not who they are or who they belong to. The film observes their everyday life, diverse culture, rich herds of cows, sheep and shepherd dogs. They work, talk, dance, play music, discuss, preach, pray, walk and sing as the mountains above remind them how ephemeral their existence is.

Almost 25 years after war and genocide shattered Bosnia-Herzegovina, can the country's youth show the way to reconciliation, peace, and prosperity?

Bilja was seriously wounded in the 1992 shelling of Sarajevo. A French photographer took pictures of her while she lay bleeding and desperately begging for help; pictures of Bilja's wounds made him famous. Zbanic searches for Bilja and reconstructs the moment when news became more important than her life.

Feature documentary about a young man, Dino, who spent a part of his youth in a closed radical religious communes of “vahaby” movement in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Totally Personal creates a historical document both droll and touching out of Begovic and his family's memories, meditations, and observations. The history begins in the communist era, continues through the war that ravaged the former Yugoslavia and into today's post-war period.

The inhabitants trapped in Sarajevo during the Yugoslavian War made an amateur video calling for a time machine to get them out of the city. Simultaneous translation is used to bring this call out of the past and into the present.

The carnage in Sarajevo provides the focus of this French documentary which seeks to call attention to the terrible conflict in the hopes of finally ending it. The film is divided into five parts. Each part covers a time frame ranging from April 4, 1992, the beginning of the war, to the present. The major issues that occur are three-fold. It depicts the systematic genocide of Bosnians, the silence of Western countries, and the determination of the Bosnians to resist. They refuse to be seen as victims, even though the filmmakers portray them so. Also included are the origins and political aspects of the war. It offers interviews with participants. It also reveals how the U.S. State Department censored reports about Serbian death camps.

On 8 September 2019 Sarajevo hosted its first Pride March, and this film covers its background.

A documentary detailing the lives of the children seen in Nenad Dizdarevic's "An Awkward Age" as well as the conditions within former-Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

A hotel in the centre of town is a war-time home and refuge for many of Sarajevo's homeless people. Every morning they leave the hotel and wander around the destroyed city gathering again at the defunct hotel in the afternoon. This film follows their separate fates through the bitter comparing of images of the bums with those of dogs abandoned by their owners and now left et the mercy of the war ravaged streets of Sarajevo.

A personal interpretation of the blockade of Bosnia and Herzegovina's capital.

This is a film that shows portraits of three children who lived in Sarajevo during the siege. Through their stories the film tries to give a picture of youngsters who live in the war for three and a half years and their efforts to overcome the trauma. The stories are seemingly separate, but the thread that connects them is a three-year-old boy who on his tricycle constantly wanders the streets of Sarajevo, passing everywhere and always seeing everything. He takes us from one child to another, opening up before us a picture of the bizarre life of children in Sarajevo.

A documentary film shot in the occasion of the third anniversary of Bosnian Army.

A cellar-dwelling woman talks about her life to a camera during the devastating war in Bosnia.

Made by the Sarajevo Group of Authors (SAGA), a collective created during the siege of Sarajevo, this documentary captures stories of war that occurred during the conflict.

This work is inspired by a truth of Jenny Holzer which says: „When something terrible happens people don't wake up“. This truth is questionable once the scenes from ruined Sarajevo are shown.

This film deals with the atrocities of war as portrayed by a film student who spends some time working as a medic. One of the duties he performed was to carry amputated limbs to the cremation furnace. This is a film about the collective madness that engulfed Sarajevo. A one-armed boy is troubled because he can't make big, firm snowballs; a man who lost both legs demonstrates walking on his stumps... The film and the director's story help us understand the commotion and tumult that have occurred in the minds of Sarajevans.

Between 1993 and 1995, artist and photographer Louis Jammes took pictures of people on the streets of Sarajevo under siege and gave them angelic face and wings. Then he put his huge portraits on destroyed city walls. Suddenly, it seems as life is getting back with their arrival, because they brought a sense of peace, beauty, nostalgia...

A child in Dobrinja neighborhood of Sarajevo under siege, has a hobby of collecting bomb shells.