Top film awards go to Danis Tanović, Ado Hasanović and student filmmakers at the 21st Bosnian Herzegovinian Film Festival. Amra Bakšić Čamo is the recipient of a special Golden Apple.
New York City, April 2025 — The Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival (BHFF) in New York City is excited to announce the winners of the Golden Apple Awards for the 21st edition. Producer Amra Bakšić Čamo was awarded a special Golden Apple for Outstanding Contributions to Bosnian-Herzegovinian Cinema. The winners of the BHFF 2025 Golden Apple Jury Awards were selected by this year’s esteemed jurors: filmmaker Bojan Bodružić, film and media scholar Olivera Jokić, and Bosnian diaspora conference organizer Ida Sefer.
Danis Tanović’s My Late Summer captured the BHFF 2025 Jury Award for Best Feature Film.
“A beautiful complex production that draws on a sophisticated screenplay, My Late Summer shows us how rich cinematic stories can be made again from the material of ordinary human lives in the region. Anchored by two excellent lead performances and an entire cast of remarkable supporting actors, My Late Summer is a work that reminds us that film is an art form that registers vividly how we feel about the world that offers many unexpected plot twists.”
- BHFF 2025 Official Jury
Ado Hasanović’s My Father’s Diaries wins the BHFF 2025 Jury Award for Best Documentary Film.
“By a unanimous decision of the jury, the award for the best documentary film goes to My Father’s Diaries, a deeply moving and unsentimental work that considers what it means to transform into historical documentation the materials that find themselves in front of the filmmaker. My Father’s Diaries explores how the work of documentation draws into its orbit witnesses willing and unwilling, and gets anyone whose past wants to be reconstructed to be its co-author. Brilliantly emplotted and edited so viewers have little use for their otherwise solid knowledge of chronology, historical dates and events, My Father’s Diaries gets us to question how we know a historic moment when we see one recorded, and what it might take to have an ordinary life.” - BHFF 2025 Official Jury
Student filmmaker Isidora Ratković’s Good Luck, Sara receives the BHFF 2025 Jury Award for Best Short Narrative Film.
“Good Luck, Sara is a film whose distinctive cinematic vision and mature authorial voice set it apart from other films in the region. Good Luck, Sara uses the short form with great precision to engage with large social and ethical questions, from global migration to gender norms and economic crisis. Centering the film’s unusual heroine, a young woman about to emigrate, Good Luck, Sara also becomes a portrait of the city of Sarajevo as a bundle of feelings and memories that make it familiar as well as important to leave.” - BHFF 2025 Official Jury
The BHFF 2025 Jury Award for Best Acting Performance is awarded to Dina Mušanović for her role in Good Luck, Sara.
“The award for best acting performance goes to Dina Mušanović for the sensitivity and nuance with which she plays the role of Sara in the short film Good Luck, Sara. Playing a young woman out on a quest to complete a series of small practical tasks before she leaves her familiar life in Sarajevo for the promise of a better one in Australia, Mušanović works with great subtlety through a series of characterizations that exceed gender stereotypes and command emotional responses that defy victimhood and didacticism.” - BHFF 2025 Official Jury
The BHFF 2025 Jury Special Mentions go to Gym by Srđan Vuletić and All Because of a Bull, a student film directed by Emir Solaković.
“The jury commends Gym and its intricate screenplay because this film reminds us that cinematic narratives have the rare power to make visible the forces that shape our everyday lives, our relationships to each other, and the roles we play: women, men, workers, grownups, influencers. Giving charge to a network of relationships among a whole cast of characters, Gym makes it clear how a film without a hero can make us all responsible for the way we live in a society like this one, quick to make victims and slow to remember why superheroes never really come.” - BHFF 2025 Official Jury
“In a year of films training our eye on animals, from fish to horses and birds, All Because of a Bull merits a special mention for its extraordinary portrayal of a bond between a young woman and the bulls she prepares for their unpredictable careers in bullfights. One bull in particular becomes a three-dimensional character in this biography because she knows his feelings, reads his moods, recognizes when his career and his life are ending. For showing us this kind of life and love and for enriching our imagination of a good life in Bosnia, the jury wishes to commend All Because of a Bull.” - BHFF 2025 Official Jury
The winner of this year’s BHFF 2025 Audience Award is My Father’s Diaries, directed by Ado Hasanović.
Festival Director Ivona Boroje and Chief Programmer Dijana Jelača say:
“On behalf of the entire BHFF team, congratulations to all the deserving winners of this year’s Golden Apples! We are thrilled with all the amazing films we showed at this year’s festival, as well as grateful to the guest filmmakers in attendance, who participated in illuminating conversations with the audience. Thank you also to the jury, donors, and especially to our audiences, who turned out in incredible numbers and yet again helped create an atmosphere of excitement, joy, and true appreciation for BH cinema.”
