'Everything That's Wrong With You' Premieres at Sarajevo
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- Urša Menart's "Everything That's Wrong With You" premieres in narrative feature competition at Sarajevo Film Festival, inspired by young people — mostly women — inventing tragic life stories to hold followers' attention, and the followers who would travel across continents to meet them
- The film follows Maruša (played by Anuša Kodelja), a Slovenian woman grieving her mother's death, who befriends Alja (Klara Kuk), a German nurse, after a first message spirals into a fast-developing online friendship that buckles once they meet in person
- Menart spent nearly seven years developing the project, citing Slovenia's lengthy financing-and-co-production timeline and her worry that the theme would still resonate years after conception
- Both lead actors auditioned for the opposite character; Menart then spent an additional year developing the performances with Anuša Kodelja and Klara Kuk and adjusting the script accordingly
- Filming took place in Heringsdorf, a small German seaside town with no feature-production infrastructure, forcing a minimal-lights, small-van shoot that Menart says suited the story's intimate scale
- Menart explicitly contrasts the film with the much-discussed male loneliness epidemic, saying she wanted to focus on young women because "women live more interesting lives" and their interior worlds remain underexplored on screen
- The film is produced by Slovenia's Vertigo with co-producers Germany's Chromosom Film, Tidewater Pictures, Serbia's Living Pictures, and RTV Slovenija, supported by Creative Europe MEDIA and other regional funds
Why it matters: Menart positions the film as a deliberate counterweight to heavily-covered male loneliness narratives, arguing women's interior lives remain underexplored on screen even as cultural conversation about isolation intensifies. The seven-year development cycle and Sarajevo world premiere — after an earlier CineLink industry presentation at the same festival — give a regional auteur an international platform as parasocial relationships become a defining cultural anxiety.
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