Interview at Sarajevo Film Fest with Serbian star Mirjana Karanovic

Mirjana Karanovic’s star is shining brightly at this year’s Sarajevo Film Festival (SFF).

Serbian actress turned director presents world premiere of her latest feature film Mother Maraa film that traces the world of a middle-aged woman and how she deals with death, but which is also a film overflowing with life.

Karanovich’s international breakthrough came with Emir Kusturica’s Palme d’Or-winning and Oscar-nominated film. When Dad’s Away on Business (1985) and the veteran actress has spent decades establishing herself as one of Southern Europe’s most acclaimed acting talents, with leading roles in acclaimed films such as Requiem for Mrs. J And The Hunchbackbefore, at the age of 60, deciding to move behind the camera.

Her first feature film as a director, A good wife (2016), which premiered at Sundance, Karanovic will play an unassuming Serbian wife and mother forced to confront her own mortality and her husband’s dark secrets. “Karanovic’s quiet intelligence and innate humanity have been an asset in many of her roles, and her directorial debut displays similar qualities,” it reads. The Hollywood ReporterThe opinion of at the time.

Now comes Mother Marain which Karanovic directs and stars again in another story about an older woman struggling to free herself from what the filmmaker describes as “the patriarchal rule of life.”

“I like unexpected things in life, especially in what I do. I like things that are not visible at first glance, things that I can imagine existing,” Karanovic said. THR ahead of this year’s Sarajevo Film Festival.

In a wide-ranging conversation, she also talked about her life and career, the current state of European cinema and why, these days, she’s not one to frequent late nights at festivals.

What drew you to the character of Mara, and what do you think we can all learn from her journey?

My patriarchal upbringing made me look at women over 40 or 50 throughout my life as if they had fulfilled their role and were only good for being a kind of noble aunt, grandmother – quiet women in the background. However, my personal experience has taught me something completely different. During my 40s and 50s, I struggled with this patriarchal experience and my need to develop as a feminine being in a society where women are still considered objects. All my heroines, both in films and in television series, have been women. The Good Wife and now in the movie Mother Maraare women my age.

I wanted to tell something about them, something that, it seems to me, in the films of my country, and perhaps even of the whole region, is a different, unusual story. For me, Mara is a woman who conformed to this patriarchal rule of life and who buried deep inside herself everything that constituted her true essence. With the death of her son, this hidden content…