Paolo Sorrentino in 2025 Sarajevo Film Festival Honor, Retrospective

Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino is this year’s recipient of the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo award to be bestowed upon him during the 31st edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival, which will also feature a retrospective of his films that will be screened as part of the fest’s “tribute to” program.

The honor and tribute will be “in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the art of cinema,” Sarajevo fest organizers said on Tuesday. Sorrentino will also hold a masterclass and “share his thoughts on contemporary art in a conversation with the audience,” they noted.

“I am deeply honored to receive this prestigious recognition and grateful for the attention given to my filmography,” said Sorrentino. “I look forward to being with you in Sarajevo. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

The fest highlighted the effect the Italian director and screenwriter’s oeuvre has had on audiences. “Paolo Sorrentino [has] managed to do what every filmmaker dreams of – he left a global impact through local, personal stories,” said Jovan Marjanović, director of the Sarajevo Film Festival. “With visually luxurious, emotionally filled, and intellectually insightful style, he won the hearts of audiences around the world who saw his characters, no matter how eccentric or withdrawn, as a mirror of our world, often absurd, sometimes cruel, but always deeply human. The Honorary Heart of Sarajevo is a recognition of the great beauty that he gave us with his films.”

Born in Naples in 1970, Sorrentino’s first full-length feature film, One Man Up, came out in 2001 and was selected for the Venice Film Festival. His next two films, The Consequences of Love (2004) and The Family Friend (2006) were in competition for the Palme d’Or in Cannes, as was Il Divo, which won the jury prize in 2008. Sorrentino also returned to the Cannes competition in 2011 with This Must Be the Place and in 2013 with The Great Beauty, which won the Academy Award, the Golden Globe, and the BAFTA Award for the best foreign-language Film.

After another Cannes competition appearance in 2016 with Youth, he created and directed the TV series The Young Pope in 2016, followed by the movie Loro in 2018 and the series The New Pope in 2019.

In 2021, Sorrentino wrote and directed The Hand of God, which won the Marcello Mastroianni Award at the Venice International Film Festival and five David di Donatello awards, followed by Parthenope in 2024.

Previous recipients of the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo include Meg Ryan (2024), Alexander Payne (2024), John Turturro (2024), Mark Cousins (2023), Lynne Ramsay (2023), Charlie Kaufman (2023), Jesse Eisenberg (2022), Ruben Östlund (2022), Sergei Loznitsa (2022), Paul Joseph Schrader (2022), Wim Wenders (2021), Michel Franco (2020), Mads Mikkelsen (2020), Tim Roth (2019), Isabelle Huppert (2019), Alejandro González Iñárritu (2019), Paweł Pawlikowski (2019), Oliver Stone (2017), John Cleese (2017), Stephen Frears (2016), Robert De Niro (2016), Benicio Del Toro (2015), Danis Tanović (2014), Gael García Bernal (2014), Béla Tarr (2013), Branko Lustig (2012), Jafar Panahi (2011), Angelina Jolie (2011), Steve Buscemi (2007), Mike Leigh (2006), and Gavrilo Grahovac (2006).

Previous filmmakers in the spotlight in a Sarajevo Film Festival “tribute to” program include
Elia Suleiman (2024), Jessica Hausner (2023), Sergei Loznitsa (2022), Wim Wenders (2021), Michel Franco (2020), Paweł Pawlikowski (2019), Nuri Bilge Ceylan (2018), Joshua Oppenheimer and Oliver Stone (2017), Michael Winterbottom (2014), Cristi Puiu (2013), Todd Solondz (2012), Jia Zhang-ke (2009), Todd Haynes (2008), Tsai Ming-Liang and Ulrich Seidl (2007), Abel Ferrara and Béla Tarr (2006), Alexander Payne (2005), Stephen Frears (2002), Mike Leigh (2001), and Steve Buscemi (2000).