Sarajevo Fest Honors Woody Harrelson, Screens 'No Man's Land'
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- Woody Harrelson will receive the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo Award at the festival's 32nd edition, following recent recipients Stellan Skarsgård, Meg Ryan, Alexander Payne and Lynne Ramsay.
- Festival director Jovan Marjanović praised Harrelson's "remarkable ease of performance," calling it "one of the hardest qualities to achieve on screen" and "an inspiration to many future generations."
- Welcome to Sarajevo, Harrelson's 1997 Michael Winterbottom film about journalists covering the Bosnian War, will be re-screened in the festival's open-air programme — it originally played at the 3rd Sarajevo Film Festival less than two years after the siege ended.
- Danis Tanović's 'No Man's Land' (2001 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar winner) will get a special 25th anniversary screening in a restored 4K version, exploring "the absurdity of war through the prism of the Bosnian War."
- Harrelson holds three Academy Award nominations — Best Actor for The People vs. Larry Flynt and Best Supporting Actor for The Messenger and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri — and next leads Apple TV's Brothers with Matthew McConaughey (September 23 premiere).
- Harrelson's upcoming slate includes Quentin Dupieux's Full Phil opposite Kristen Stewart (Cannes premiere), Netflix's The Cackling of the Dodos with Sam Rockwell, and a documentary on Austin's Armadillo World Headquarters.
Why it matters: Harrelson's honor closes a personal loop — he was in *Welcome to Sarajevo* when the festival was barely three years old, and the film was made as the city was still recovering from the 1992–95 siege. Pairing the award with a 25th-anniversary 4K restoration of *No Man's Land* signals the festival's dual mission of recognizing Hollywood talent while keeping Bosnian War cinema in active theatrical circulation rather than archive-only.
