The Balkan Cowboy

Premiering at this year’s Sarajevo Film Festival (August 14-21), The Balkan Cowboy is a magical doc feature debut from acclaimed visual artist Dragana Jurišić, an “exile not an expatriate” long based in Ireland. Returning to the site of her homeland that vanished “like Atlantis in the realm of imaginary places and people,” as she narrates in VO, Jurišić captures the fracturing of Yugoslavia through the story of Harry Jackson, a cult director of Westerns, family friend and childhood hero (despite her iconoclastic idol repeatedly noting that she had “such an ugly name for such a pretty girl.” Though she goes on to explain that her distinctly Serbian moniker was bestowed by her dad just to piss off his Croatian nationalist father, and that rather than change it she decided it was wiser to change the country).

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