The 50 Years Award – Cinehill’s recognition for filmmakers who have dedicated half a century to the art of cinema – was presented to the cult Bosnian-Herzegovinian actor and director Zijah Sokolović for his rich and eclectic body of work.
His conversation with Miroljub Vučković, a member of the International Federation of Film Critics, FIPRESCI, may have been driven indoors by a sudden downpour, to the intimate atmosphere of Kino Mak, but it no less intelligent, witty and good-humoured for it.
This year’s mini-retrospective in Sokolović’s honour includes three titles – the short The Charm of Bureaucracy by Vefik Hadžismajlović, specially restored for the occasion, Jasmina by Nedžad Begović, and The Pavilion, the darkly comic drama from 2024 by Dino Mustafić.
However, yesterday’s conversation opened not with a film, but with Sokolović narrating the fairy tale of The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats. With characteristic wit, he noted that the widespread circulation of those fairy tales on audio tapes in the former Yugoslavia – over four million cassettes sold – had made his voice so recognisable that children and adults alike would refer to him simply as “the wolf from the seven goats”.
Sokolović and Vučković then turned to his acting journey, his sources of inspiration, and his celebrated 1978 one-man theatre piece An Actor…Is an Actor…Is an Actor, which he also performed at this year’s festival.
We learned that the piece has become one of the longest-running and most frequently performed theatrical works in the territory of the former Yugoslavia. Sokolović explained that he wrote it as an act of creative rebellion and an exploration of the boundaries of theatre – a work that interrogates the very essence of an actor’s vocation and the relationship between performer and fictional narrative.
Amid a wealth of anecdotes about the play’s travels to Austria and the United States, Sokolović added that the show has been performed over 1600 times in dozens of countries across the world, and its text has been translated into numerous languages. Beyond the stage, An Actor…Is an Actor…Is an Actor also exists as a book.
Sokolović and Vučković addressed the challenges of acting and directing in a society in constant flux with equal wit. Following a self-deprecating comment about a film in which he played an Ustasha, Sokolović recalled that the film had been screened to troops during his military service, and that his commanding officer had told him it was perfectly acceptable for him to play an Ustasha – but not acceptable that he had put so much effort into it.
Sokolović explained his celebrated role in Rajko Grlić’s melodrama You Love Only Once by noting that Grlić had chosen him precisely because they always argued, and went on to describe the creative process of bringing a caricatured character to life as a fully rounded person constrained by the system.
Sokolović and Vučković also discussed performing Chekhov’s The Bear with orchestral accompaniment, and as the conversation drew to a close, it left the audience with a clear impression that the lifetime achievement award had been bestowed on exactly the right person.
