Sarajevo on film 2016 France
No Smoking in Sarajevo
The story of Zabranjeno Pušenje — the band that named a whole Sarajevo register — told by its three founding members.
- Director
- Gianluca Loffredo, Andrea Postiglione
- Year
- 2016
- Language
- French / Bosnian
- Country
- France
- Genre
- documentary, music
No Smoking in Sarajevo is the story of Zabranjeno Pušenje — literally “No Smoking” — the band that, with its sister project Top Lista Nadrealista, defined Sarajevo’s New Primitivism in the early 1980s: a movement of deadpan absurdism, working-class humour, and a completely local register of irony. The documentary is told through its three founding members — Sejo Sexon, Nele Karajlić, and Fudo — who took the band’s particular Sarajevo sensibility into different lives when the war scattered them.
The film premiered in Paris in October 2016 and had its Sarajevo premiere at the Sarajevo Film Festival in December of the same year, going on to win the Jury Award for Best Documentary at the 2017 Bosnian-Herzegovinian film awards. It is, in effect, a film about a register of humour: the self-mocking, impossible-to-offend Sarajevan deadpan that the site’s own voice guide descends from.
For a visitor, it is the key to understanding how Sarajevo talks to itself — the bazaar, the cafés, and the city’s joke culture. Watch it alongside the siege-era humour and you have the city’s comic identity, from the 1980s to today.
Critical reception
The documentary won the Golden Apple for Best Documentary at the 2017 Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival in New York. English-language critical coverage is scarce; the fullest review came from the Bosnian critic Sead Vegara in Oslobođenje, who praised the director’s sincerity while noting that a foreign filmmaker had told a story domestic directors had left untold.
Public reception and legacy
The film’s theatrical run was itself part of the story: the band members noted that a documentary reaching Sarajevo cinemas was unusual, and it played at the city’s Cinema City multiplex after a special screening. It won the Jury Award for Best Documentary at the 2017 Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival in New York. Its cultural role is preserving the record of Zabranjeno Pušenje and New Primitivism — a body of songs that, as the local press put it, raised generations.
What the critics said
“"vidi se da je reditelj unio srce i dušu u projekat" ("you can see the director put his heart and soul into the project")”Read the review →