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The Sarajevo Film Festival, the leading festival for South-East European cinema, unveiled the lineups for the four competition sections on Thursday, which include 21 world premieres, six international premieres, one European premiere and 23 regional premieres. The 32nd edition runs from Aug. 14 to 21.

The narrative feature films section includes nine films from South-East Europe, of which one film will have its world premiere, one its international premiere, one its European premiere, and six their regional premieres.

Elma Tataragić, the programmer of the section, said, “The selection is dominated by second and third features, alongside one debut and two fifth feature films, reflecting both the emergence of new voices and the continued development of established auteurs. Together, these nine films offer a rich panorama of contemporary regional cinema, spanning intimate family dramas, coming-of-age stories, social realism, and formally adventurous works. With six of the nine films directed by women, this year’s competition reflects not only the artistic diversity of the region but also the growing strength and plurality of voices shaping its cinematic future.”

Competition Program – Narrative Feature Film:
EVERYTHING THAT’S WRONG WITH YOU, Urša Menart (Slovenia, Germany, Serbia, 2026, 97 min.) – World Premiere
After the emotional collapse that follows her mother’s death, Maruša builds an online bond with Alja, a nurse living in a small coastal town in Germany. Bonding through humor over their shared struggles, Maruša and Alja quickly develop a friendship that is put to the test when they finally meet in person.
SMALL THINGS, Zvonimir Jurić (Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, 2026, 80 min.) – International Premiere
During a winter weekend, sisters Anica and Irena, accompanied by Irena’s two children, travel to an island to visit their father and their brother Ivan, a quiet loner. The reason for the gathering is their father’s decision to sell the family land. Confined in the worn-down family house, the members of the family are forced to confront long-suppressed tensions and difficult choices, while one of them will have to make the ultimate sacrifice.
SKATEBOARDING IS NOT FOR GIRLS, Dina Duma (North Macedonia, Belgium, Slovenia, Croatia, 2026, 82 min.) – European Premiere
In Skopje, 11-year-old Adela and her elder sister Zara share a deep bond shaped by their navigation of two contradictory worlds. At school, they are typical, rebellious teens with skateboards, social media, crop tops, and boyfriends. After school, in a quiet and disciplined mode, they help their mother with cleaning jobs to make ends meet. When poverty shakes the family, Adela tries to find a way to save her sister – still a minor – from a fate that is becoming almost inevitable: an arranged marriage.
17, Kosara Mitić (North Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia, 2026, 105 min.) – Regional Premiere
Seventeen-year-old Sara is hiding a secret during a school trip. When the excursion spirals out of control and Sara witnesses her friend Lina being sexually assaulted, the two girls try to break the cycle of casual violence. This seals an everlasting bond between them.
DUA, Blerta Basholli (Kosovo, Switzerland, France, 2026, 101 min.) – Regional Premiere
Pristina, Kosovo, late 1990s. As war looms and ethnic tensions escalate, 13-year-old Dua struggles to find her place among her peers and within her changing body. After an incident shakes her community, she becomes a target herself and bonds with a fearless girl who draws her toward an unexpected form of resistance. Between the daily violence and the growing threat of exile, there is little room for quiet awakenings.
EVERYTIME, Sandra Wollner (Austria, Germany, 2026, 121 min.) – Regional Premiere
A tragedy brings a mother, a daughter, and a teenage boy together. Struggling with blame and forgiveness, the unlikely trio takes a trip to Tenerife for a family holiday that never happens. Under the glow of the sun, past and present quietly start to overlap.
SHAME AND MONEY, Visar Morina (Germany, Kosovo, Slovenia, Albania, North Macedonia, Belgium, 2026, 129 min.) – Regional Premiere
A couple in their forties live with their extended family in rural Kosovo, where they make a modest living from their farm. Following a familial dispute, their livelihood is lost. They are forced to move to Pristina, where the pressure to provide for their family weighs heavily on the parents as they do their best to find work and a place to stay. A journey into a hyper-capitalist society begins.
SUPPORTING ROLE, Ana Urushadze (Georgia, Estonia, Türkiye, 2026, 139 min.) – Regional Premiere
Niaz Ninua has seen brighter days. Once a leading man, he stepped away from cinema some 15 years ago. When he decides to return, he discovers a landscape that no longer revolves around him. He attends a casting session for a supporting role in a debut feature directed by a young woman. The encounter bruises his pride, and he leaves unconvinced, dismissing the role as pretentious. Yet, as he replays the encounter, Niaz begins to sense a pull toward the role he so quickly dismissed. What seemed beneath him starts to reveal contours he did not anticipate.
YOU DON’T BELONG HERE, Florin Șerban (Romania, 2026, 154 min.) – Regional Premiere
Marius, the chief medical officer at a hospital in his small hometown, is raising his teenage son Ioan alone after the death of his wife. Marius is a confident professional who has no idea what his son gets up to at night: cycling through town vandalizing cars with a gang of masked vigilantes. Marius’ world is shaken when he learns the police have come to suspect his son of murder.

Competition Program – Documentary Feature:
BEAR WITH ME, Martin Genovski (Bulgaria, 2026, 84 min.) – World Premiere
GOOD PEOPLE, Milcho Manchevski (North Macedonia, 2026, 86 min.) – World Premiere
THE BALKAN COWBOY, Dragana Jurišić (Croatia, Ireland, 2026, 93 min.) – World Premiere
THE FORBIDDEN AUNT, Bojana Novaković (Serbia, Australia, 2026, 82 min.) – World Premiere
WE SHALL LIVE TOGETHER, Damir Markovina (Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2026, 75 min.) – World Premiere
DON’T ASK ME IF I KILLED, Helena Maksyom (Romania, Netherlands, Germany, Ukraine, 2026, 103 min.) – International Premiere
FRAGMENTS OF BELONGING, Tatjana Božić (Croatia, Netherlands, Germany, 2026, 80 min.) – International Premiere
WHEN I GET OUT, Metod Pevec (Slovenia, 2026, 106 min.) – International Premiere
32 METERS, Morteza Atabaki (Türkiye, Iran, Qatar, 2025, 83 min.) – Regional Premiere
BUGBOY, Lucas Paleocrassas (Greece, France, Denmark, 2026, 87 min.) – Regional Premiere
ELECTING MS SANTA, Raisa Răzmeriță (Moldova, Romania, 2025, 95 min.) – Regional Premiere
FOR LIFE, Ahmet Seven (Türkiye, 2026, 89 min.) – Regional Premiere
TO HOLD A MOUNTAIN, Biljana Tutorov, Petar Glomazić (Serbia, France, Montenegro, Slovenia, Croatia, 2026, 105 min.) – Regional Premiere

Competition Program – Documentary Shorts:
BRO RAM, Branko Schmidt (Croatia, 2026, 14 min.) – World Premiere
FAHRUDIN, Alen Drljević (Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2026, 20 min.) – World Premiere
OF LIGHT GHOSTS, Isabella Fellinger (Austria, 2026, 27 min.) – World Premiere
THE CAPTAIN AND THE CASPIAN SEA, Turkan Huseyin (Azerbaijan, 2026, 30 min.) – World Premiere
DEAR ORCHID, Hana Selena Sokolović (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Netherlands, 2026, 18 min.) – International Premiere
ASPARAGUS BEAR, Ivan Grgur (Croatia, 2025, 18 min.) – Regional Premiere
HOLY DEFIANCE, Karla Jelić (Croatia, 2026, 15 min.) – Regional Premiere
THE FERRY FLOWS, Zhora Papoian (Ukraine, United Kingdom, 2026, 18 min.) – Regional Premiere

Out of Competition
YUGO GOES TO AMERICA, Filip Grujić, Aleksa Borković (Serbia, Croatia, 2026, 87 min.) – National Premiere

Competition Program – Narrative Short Film
DITCH, Marianna Vas (Hungary, 2026, 24 min.) – World Premiere
HIDDEN IN FRAME, Anna Sarukhanova (Georgia, United Kingdom, 2026, 16 min.) – World Premiere
MAMAMA, Danica Dakić (Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2026, 8 min.) – World Premiere
PATCH, Luka Galešić (Croatia, 2026, 13 min.) – World Premiere
PORKATAL, Sis Gürdal (Türkiye, France, United Kingdom, 2026, 16 min.) – World Premiere
ADGWA-ATA, Zsuzsanna Krief (Hungary, France, 2026, 15 min.) – Regional Premiere
COSMONAUTS, Leo Černic (Slovenia, Italy, 2026, 14 min.) – Regional Premiere
GO OUTSIDE AND HUG A TREE, Irina Alexiu (Romania, 2026, 14 min.) – Regional Premiere
MOTHERHOOD, Anca Damian (Romania, Belgium, France, 2026, 18 min.) – Regional Premiere
NOBODY SAID ANYTHING, Tamara Todorović (Serbia, France, Slovenia, Croatia, 2026, 15 min.) – Regional Premiere

Competition Program – Student Short Film
HYENA, Fanny Rösch (Austria, 2026, 23 min.) – World Premiere
NEIGHBOR, Dan Grabnar (Serbia, 2026, 17 min.) – World Premiere
SISTERS, Sara Ećimović (Serbia, 2026, 21 min.) – World Premiere
THE GO-BETWEEN, Emir Solaković (Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2026, 7 min.) – World Premiere
UNWELLNESS, Réka Pinczés (Hungary, 2026, 21 min.) – World Premiere
WATER WALLS, Bianka Szelestey (Hungary, 2026, 34 min.) – World Premiere
THE FUTURE IS IN YOUR HANDS, BUT WHY NOT LEND IT TO THE SPECIALISTS?, Alexandra Schinteie (Romania, 2026, 18 min.) – International Premiere
A. WANTS OUT (ON NEUTRALITY), Zorah Berghammer (Austria, 2026, 18 min.) – Regional Premiere
BONEFUZZ, Márk László (Hungary, 2026, 10 min.) – Regional Premiere
OVER THE THRESHOLD, Tara Gajović (Serbia, 2026, 15 min.) – Regional Premiere
RABBIT DON’T RUN, Maximilian Conway, Elisabeth Jakob (Austria, 2026, 30 min.) – Regional Premiere

Daniel Wu received the Best from the East Award at the New York Asian Film Festival, capping a stretch that has put him back at the center of Hong Kong’s two biggest franchises: “Cold War 1994” and the “Twilight of the Warriors” series.

“Cold War 1994” is the third installment in the “Cold War” series, a prequel written and directed by Longman Leung and produced by Bill Kong and Ivy Ho, set in the run-up to Hong Kong’s 1997 handover. The first two films, released in 2012 and 2016, were the highest-grossing Hong Kong productions of their respective years. In the new film, Wu plays Peter Choi opposite Terrance Lau’s M.B. Lee, a character previously portrayed as a full-blown villain by Chang Kuo-chu in “Cold War 2.”

Wu tells Variety he never consciously stepped away from Hong Kong film. The pandemic simply thinned out a schedule that had settled into a rhythm of one American project and one Asian project a year. When “Cold War” came along, the pull was the production itself.

“It’s going to be a quality production, the scale of it, the script,” Wu says of what drew him back, pointing also to the chance to work alongside three generations of Hong Kong actors, including Lau, whom he singles out as representative of the industry’s new generation.

The film folds a police procedural into a much larger political canvas, tracking the British colonial government, the Hong Kong police, a powerful business dynasty and the criminal underworld as the territory changes hands. Wu, who was 22 at the time of the actual handover, says the setting let the production dig into a period of corruption and upheaval he lived through but never fully understood until now.

Playing a younger version of a character already established as an antagonist gave Wu a different kind of challenge than he’s used to. He calls the role the most morally ambiguous he’s taken on, since it required tracing how a man who becomes an “evil mastermind” gets there gradually, through a series of compromised choices, rather than starting out that way.

Returning to a Hong Kong set after several years away felt less like a job and more like a reunion, Wu says. He recalls arriving for his costume fitting and recognizing nearly everyone in the room, a small-industry familiarity he doesn’t get on American productions, where he’s lucky to know one or two people on a given crew. Sitting down on set with his rice box for lunch, eating char siu fan alongside people he’d worked with for decades, brought back what he calls a genuinely warm feeling. He credits Hong Kong crews with a particular work ethic: “efficient, fast, and no bullshit,” a directness he links to a broader Hong Kong attitude of simply getting things done.

Wu spent much of his “Cold War 1994” press tour in Hong Kong wearing a hat that, it turns out, was hiding a new haircut for his role in “Twilight of the Warriors: The Final Chapter,” the sequel to director Soi Cheang’s “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In.” That 2024 film, adapted from Yu Yi’s novel “City of Darkness” and the manhua of the same name by Andy Seto, became Hong Kong’s second-biggest commercial hit ever and swept the Hong Kong Film Awards. Where “Walled In” was set in the 1980s, the new installment moves the story to 1993, the year Kowloon’s Walled City was demolished.

Wu, who studied the Walled City’s architecture in school, calls the setting a rare chance to build a mainstream action franchise around a genuinely singular piece of Hong Kong urban history. He sees both projects as part of a broader shift in how Hong Kong cinema treats its own past, using the 1990s, a decade he says filmmakers “glossed over” while living through it, as material for reflection rather than backdrop.

That shift, Wu says, is happening at a moment when Hong Kong productions can draw on newer digital tools while still leaning on the practical, in-camera stunt work the industry built its reputation on, recalling a time when performers “threw themselves off the top of a building and just did it for real in camera.” He pushes back on the long-running narrative that Hong Kong film is dying, arguing instead that it’s in something closer to a renaissance, even with a fraction of the annual output it had in the 1980s and ’90s. “There’s a lot of interesting films being made, whether big scale or small scale, a lot of great performances, a lot of great scripts being written,” he says.

The kinds of roles Wu is offered in Hong Kong have shifted too, from the younger leading-man parts that defined much of his career to more mature, fatherly characters, a change he credits partly to age and partly to the character work he’s done in the U.S., where his credits have included the AMC martial-arts series “Into the Badlands,” HBO’s “Westworld,” the film “Tomb Raider” and the animated series “American Born Chinese.” He says that kind of opportunity has thinned out generally, arguing Hollywood has moved past a period of genuinely interesting roles for Asian American actors and back toward “crumbs” or stereotypical parts. He’s more pointed about the ceiling he still sees in the industry, where he says opportunities for Asian American actors, and especially Asian American males, remain narrow.

Moving between the two industries has left Wu with what he describes as an unusual sense of identity, neither fully of one world nor the other, but both at once. He notes that his experience differs from most Asian American peers, many of whom have never topped a call sheet, while his own career has run the opposite path: character roles in the U.S., leading roles in Asia. He also points to a structural difference between the two systems: Asian productions tend to run through a single director’s vision, while larger American productions are often shaped by committee, with multiple producers weighing in, leaving him unsure at times whose direction to follow.

Looking back over 25 years, Wu points to his collaboration with director Derek Yee, spanning six films including “One Nite in Mongkok,” “Drink-Drank-Drunk,” “Protégé” and “Triple Tap,” as the turning point that pulled him away from the romantic leads he was initially cast in and toward the darker, more complex characters he prefers. He likens the partnership to Robert De Niro’s with Martin Scorsese, a shorthand so complete that he’d commit to a Yee project without reading the script. “That put my career in a direction that I wanted it to go,” he says.

Wu is now developing two scripts for the American market and one for the mainland Chinese market, a deliberate move toward more proactive control over his own projects, with an eye toward eventually returning to directing, nearly two decades after his 2007 feature debut, “Heavenly Kings.” Whatever comes next, he says the appeal hasn’t changed. Whether it’s a script’s demands or the actors around him, every project still teaches him something new. “I would say the craft, the craft still challenges me,” Wu says.

The Venice Film Festival is about to reveal its 2026 lineup, promising a plethora of buzzy titles from international directors.

Like Cannes this year, Venice is expected to have a lighter Hollywood presence than in previous editions. But that does not mean there won’t be a robust roster of awards contenders.

As previously announced, the festival will open with the world premiere of Danny Boyles “Ink,” which will also compete for the festival’s prestigious Golden Lion. The 1960s-set biographical drama stars Guy Pearce as divisive business magnate Rupert Murdoch and Jack O’Connell as Larry Lamb, the editor of Murdoch-owned U.K. tabloid The Sun. Netflix recently acquired the U.S. rights to the film.

Closing Venice this year is “Dio Ride,” the latest work from Italian filmmaker Giovanni Veronesi, in the out of competition section. The film, whose title translates to “God Laughs,” stars Pierfrancesco Favino (“Maria,” “World War Z”) as a friar in 17th-century Tuscany who manages to speak about God in a more joyful way. However, his light-hearted approach provokes the hostility of the church.

“The Bride” and “The Lost Daughter” director Maggie Gyllenhaal is set to preside over the competition jury, the third woman to do so in the past five years following Isabelle Huppert, Julianne Moore and Cate Blanchett. She will be joined by Hong Kong filmmaking giant Johnnie To, Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, Afghan filmmaker Shahrbanoo Sadat, French director and screenwriter Xavier Giannoli, “The Brutalist” composer Daniel Blumberg and U.S.-based Italian film academic Francesco Casetti.

George Clooney and Ellen Burstyn will be honored with lifetime achievement awards.

The 83rd Venice Film Festival runs from Sept. 2 to 12.

See the full lineup below, updating live.

COMPETITION

“Ink,” Danny Boyle (opening film)

VENICE OPEN (OUT OF COMPETITION — FICTION)

“Dio Ride,” Giovanni Veronesi (closing film)

OUT OF COMPETITION — NON-FICTION

FILMS ON FILMS

OUT OF COMPETITION — SHORTS

OUT OF COMPETITION — SERIES

HORIZONS

Elsa Keslassy contributed to this report.