DEATH IN SARAJEVO (SMRT U SARAJEVU) World Cinema

In 1914, a Serbian man named Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, kicking off the chain of events that led to World War I. One hundred years later, during a centennial commemoration of those events, Academy Award®-winning director Danis Tanović turns the luxurious Hotel Europa in the heart of Sarajevo into an ideological battleground. As visiting luminaries arrive for the ceremony, a looming hotel-worker strike pits a furious staff against management’s underhanded cronies, while elsewhere, arguments about the region’s turbulent history of violent conflict — beginning with Princip’s fateful act — threaten to reach a dangerous boiling point. Tanović’s sublimely fluid camera glides through every corner of the expansive hotel, breathlessly capturing the escalating tensions with virtuosic panache. The film, a potent reminder that our unstable present has deep roots in the past, won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival. — Mike Dougherty