MEET THE FILMMAKERS - BHFF 2026 GUESTS
New York City, April 2026 — The Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival (BHFF) is pleased to announce the special guests for its 22nd annual event, which include: actor Rade Šerbedžija, author Aleksandar Hemon, directors Lidija Zelović, Chris Leslie and Biliana Grozdanova, artists Aida Šehović and Bojan Stojčić, actor Igor Galijašević, and others.
The special guests for the 2026 BHFF program are:
RADE ŠERBEDŽIJA
Q&A following the screening of Pavilion
Rade Šerbedžija is a Croatian and Yugoslav actor, director and musician. He is known for his portrayals of imposing figures on both sides of the law, and is considered one of the best known Yugoslav actors in the 1970s and 1980s. He has appeared in a number of now-legendary Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav films, such as Acting Hamlet in the Village of Mrduša Donja (1973), Manhunt (1977), In the Jaws of Life (1984), Before the Rain (1994), and The Ustanička Street (2012). He is internationally known mainly for his role as Boris the Blade in Snatch (2000), his supporting roles in such Hollywood films as The Saint (1997), Mission Impossible II (2000), X-Men: First Class (2011), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010), and for his collaboration with the iconic auteur Stanley Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
Šerbedžija is a four-time recipient of the Golden Arena for Best Actor at the Pula Film Festival – Croatia's and Yugoslavia's highest filmmaking honors. He won the Critics Award for Best Actor at the 51st Venice International Film Festival for Before the Rain (1994). In 2019, he also received the International Press Academy's Mary Pickford Award, an honorary recognition "for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to the Entertainment Industry".
ALEKSANDAR HEMON
Q&A following the screening of Lint (Shorts Program)
Aleksandar Hemon is an award-winning Bosnian American author. He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University. He is the author of The World and All That It Holds (2023). He is also the author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, and three collections of short stories: The Question of Bruno (2000); Nowhere Man (2002), which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Love and Obstacles (2009). His other works include two books of nonfiction, My Parents: An Introduction and The Book of My Lives (2013), the novel The Making of Zombie Wars (2015), journalism, screenplays, and content for the Netflix original show Sense8. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004. Hemon also co-wrote the screenplay for The Matrix Resurrections (2021), the fourth installment in the popular sci-fi Matrix series.
Hemon was born and raised in Sarajevo (then Yugoslavia, now Bosnia-Herzegovina), where his father was an engineer and his mother was an accountant. In 1992 he participated in a journalist exchange program that took him to Chicago. When war broke out in his home country, he applied for, and was granted status as a political refugee in the United States. His work is largely informed by his own immigrant experiences.
BOJAN STOJČIĆ
Q&A following the screening of Steel Hotel Song (Shorts Program)
Bojan Stojčić (1988) is a visual artist from Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is the recipient of the Nadežda Petrović gallery award (Serbia, 2024), YVAA Award for the best young artist in BiH (BiH, 2023), the WHW Academy scholarship for emerging artists (Croatia, 2022), and the Revizor Scholarship for engagement and achievements in science and art (BiH, 2022). He has exhibited at numerous shows and venues, including the Antifascism: Now, curated by Kalas Liebfried (Munich, 2026), Art Encounters biennial, curated by Ana Janevski and Tevž Logar (Timișoara, 2025), Nadežda Petrović biennial, curated by Zdenka Badovinec (Čačak, 2024). Through his multimedia works, Stojčić addresses positions of the Other, be it post-Yugoslav, post-Dayton, or post-EU. Expressing himself through humor, poetics, and geopolitics, he explores traces and transformations of the present.
Photo by Almin Zrno
LIDIJA ZELOVIĆ
Q&A following the screening of Home Game
Lidija Zelović was born in 1970 in Yugoslavia. She studied Yugoslav literature and Serbo-Croatian language at the University of Sarajevo and worked on Bosnian Television starting at the age of 19. In 1993, a year after the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina broke out, Lidija moved to the Netherlands and has been living there since. She graduated with a Master of Arts degree from the Film & Television Science Department at the University of Amsterdam. Starting in 1997, Lidija has worked as a researcher and subsequently as a director, scriptwriter, and producer at various television channels, including several Dutch television broadcasters (IKON mostly), in the United Kingdom for Channel4 and BBC, as well as at the German/French ARTE channel.
Lidija has had a role in numerous film selection committees at film festivals around the world (fiction and documentary films). She has also been serving on the committee making decisions on which film projects will be financially supported by The Dutch Media Fund (2012/2017). Recently, Lidija signed a contract with Eurimage as an independent external expert. From 2007 until 2019, Lidija lectured on screenplay writing and research for documentary film to students enrolled in political science majors at the University of Amsterdam.
Photo by Maarten Kal
CHRIS LESLIE
Q&A following the screening of The Partisan Necropolis
Chris Leslie is a photographer, filmmaker, and director based in Glasgow, Scotland. His practice is primarily concerned with documenting processes of urban transformation and the lived experiences of marginalised individuals, groups, and communities. Through an engagement with both local and international contexts, Leslie's work situates itself at the intersection of documentary, social history, and visual anthropology. His long-term body of work, A Balkan Journey, constitutes a poignant exploration of post-conflict recovery and reconstruction in the former Yugoslavia. Spanning twenty-five years, the project foregrounds the enduring psychological and physical legacies of war while examining the role of memory, resilience, and collective identity in processes of reconciliation and rebuilding.
Leslie's current project, The Partisan Necropolis (2026), is conceived as both a feature-length and a television documentary. It investigates the contested heritage of the Partisan Memorial Cemetery in Mostar, tracing the site's political, cultural, and symbolic significance within contemporary debates on memory, preservation, and identity in post-conflict societies.
Photo by Mark Cameron
BILIANA GROZDANOVA
Q&A following the screening of Eastern Western
Biliana and Marina Grozdanova are Bulgarian-born, Brooklyn-based independent filmmakers. In 2012 they founded their production company, El Jinete Films, and have been co-directing as sisters ever since. They premiered their debut feature documentary "The Last Kamikazis of Heavy Metal" at the 2014 New Orleans Film Festival. Eastern Western is the Grozdanova Sisters' first narrative feature, awarded the Big Sky Sky Film Grant in 2024. It premiered at the Mill Valley Film Festival in 2024 and has screened at a dozen international film festivals, picking up awards including Best Cinematography, Best Feature, and the Carlo Simi Award for Technical-Artistic Contribution to the Western Genre (Almería Western Film Festival 2025). EL Jinete Films is now in pre-production for their next film "New Dawn Rising."
AIDA ŠEHOVIĆ
Q&A following the screening of Where Have You Been?
Aida Šehović (born 1977 in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina) is an artist whose work creates spaces for collective acts of healing, mourning, and resistance. Forced to flee her homeland in 1992, she lived as a refugee in Turkey and Germany before immigrating to the United States in 1997. In 2021, she returned to Bosnia and Herzegovina, and now lives and works in Sarajevo. She is the founder and caretaker of ŠTO TE NEMA, a participatory monument and nonprofit dedicated to imagining a world without genocide. First realized in 2006, the project traveled to 15 cities worldwide and has since evolved into a transnational initiative working with survivors, artists, and activists.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Kunsthaus Dresden, the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Queens Museum, and the 58th Venice Biennale. She has received support from Culture Push, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, among others. Where Have You Been, a feature-length documentary about her work directed by Mirko Pincelli, premiered at the 30th Sarajevo Film Festival in 2024. Šehović is also a co-producer of the film.
Photo by Armin Durgut
IGOR GALIJAŠEVIĆ
Q&A following the screening of Eastern Western
Igor Galijašević was born in Zenica, Yugoslavia, and immigrated to the United States as a refugee with his family in 1995. Based in Chicago, he has spent over two decades working as an actor, model, and musician, bringing a raw, lived-in authenticity to his performances.
A longtime presence in the heavy metal scene, Igor toured nationally with his band Hessler and was featured in the documentary Last Kamikazes of Heavy Metal, which screened at international film festivals. His background in music continues to inform his on-screen work, grounding his performances in character-driven physicality, energy, and intensity.
Eastern Western, in which he portrays an immigrant father navigating survival and identity on the American frontier, marks his first role in a narrative feature film