Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović: Last News

Christopher Vourlias Croatian writer-director Juraj Lerotić’s “Safe Place,” an emotional story of a family reeling in the wake of a suicide attempt, took the top prize at the Sarajevo Film Festival, which wrapped a record-setting 2022 edition in the Bosnian capital on Friday night.The Heart of Sarajevo Award for best feature film was given by a jury headed by Austrian filmmaker Sebastian Meise (“The Great Freedom”), which included French filmmaker Lucile Hadžihalilović (“Earwig”), Croatian writer-director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović (“Murina”), Serbian actor Milan Marić (“Dovlatov”) and Israeli producer and consultant Katriel Schory.“Safe Place” plays on Lerotić’s own pained family history, with the Croatian multihyphenate taking on the lead role in his deeply personal story — a performance that also earned him the award for best actor in Sarajevo. Fresh off a triumphant world premiere in Locarno, where the film won three awards including best first feature, “Safe Place” was described by Variety’s Guy Lodge as a “supremely poised and moving first feature” and a “shattering” debut, “with a long trail of further festival bookings surely ahead.”Ukrainian director Maryina Er Gorbach was named best director for “Klondike,” which portrays the brutal realities of the war unfolding in Ukraine’s Donbass region through the lens of a pregnant farmstead owner whose life and home fall apart.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentA testament to her fearless nature and boundless determination, Croatian-American filmmaker Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović was nine months pregnant when she traveled from New York to present her feature debut “Murina” at the Cannes Film Festival.At the end of the festival, Kusijanović tool a 12-hour road trip with her husband to her homeland in Croatia, where she gave birth to her first child Petrus, right before scooping Cannes’ Golden Camera award with “Murina,” a double feast which earned her newborn son a lifetime festival accreditation.Eight months later, she sat with Variety to tell us how her life has changed since winning the coveted award and looked back at her journey getting there. Vibrant, bright, restless and forceful like her first feature “Murina,” Kusijanović hasn’t wasted any time.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentThe Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film School is set to launch a Series Lab with the support of Netflix and VIS Social Impact, ViacomCBS International Studios’ new cause-driven production division. Hagai Levi, the creator of “In Treatment” and “The Affair,” has joined the new program as artistic advisor. For the last decade, the film school has been hosting a popular film lab which was founded by Renen Schorr and has become a major curator of world cinema gems.