Bosnia and Herzegovina has picked Alen Drljevic’s Men Don’t Cry, a drama about the physiological scars still remaining from the Yugoslav War, as its foreign-language film submission for the 2018 Oscars.
Drljevic’s debut feature premiered at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival this year, where it won a special jury prize and the Europa Cinemas Label award. Men Don’t Cry also picked up the audience award at the recent Sarajevo Film Festival.
Drljevic earned his stripes as an assistant director on the films of Golden Bear winner Jasmila Zbanic (Grbavica, On the Path), and Men Don’t Cry plays as a more testosterone-fueled take on Zbanic’s cinema of reconciliation with the region’s recent past.
The film is set at a nondescript hotel in the mountains of Bosnia where a group of middle-aged Yugoslav War veterans from different social and ethnic backgrounds get together for an extended group-therapy session.
Picture Tree International is handling worldwide sales on the film.
Bosnia and Herzegovina has been nominated only once for the foreign-language Oscar and ended up winning the prize that year, for Danis Tanovic’s No Man’s Land in 2001.
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