Montenegro Submits ‘To Hold a Mountain’ for Oscars — SkimNews
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- Montenegro selected “To Hold a Mountain” as its official international feature Oscar submission after the government canceled the Sinjajevina military training-ground plan in July.
- Tutorov and Glomazić reopened the film after the cancellation and filmed a second ending, with the updated feature scheduled to open at New York’s Film Forum on December 16.
- To Hold a Mountain won Sundance’s World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for documentary; its crew logged more than 230 shooting days, some yielding only half an hour of footage.
- Nada was 12½ when the filmmakers understood the story’s demands, and production continued until she turned 18 so she could decide whether to participate.
- Milojko Spajić said the film reinforced his view that canceling the training-ground plan was right, after he and Montenegro’s president joined the shepherds’ screening with their families, unannounced.
- Tutorov believes the film’s telling of the community’s story influenced the July cancellation, while also citing years of local organizing and a different government in power by 2025.
- Tutorov and Glomazić hauled a tent, generator and DCP into the Montenegrin highlands for the shepherds’ screening because the filmmakers had to bring their own electricity.
Why it matters: For the shepherds of Sinjajevina, July’s cancellation turned years of organizing into a concrete win: their ancestral pastures would no longer become a military training ground. As Montenegro’s Oscar entry, the film now carries that struggle to an international audience, while the filmmakers’ insistence on waiting until Nada turned 18 preserved her control over her own story.
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