Sarajevo on film 2014 Austria
Sarajevo (The Assassination)
The assassination of Franz Ferdinand, restaged on the real corner — the 2014 Austrian production that returned the events of 28 June 1914 to their streets.
- Director
- Andreas Prochaska
- Year
- 2014
- Runtime
- 104 minutes
- Language
- German
- Country
- Austria
- Genre
- historical, drama, TV
Sarajevo, the Austrian television film from 2014, returns the events of 28 June 1914 to the streets where they happened. Where earlier treatments opened with the assassination and moved on to the war, this one stays with the investigation that followed — a fictionalised police commissioner trying to establish what actually happened on the corner by the Latin Bridge, while the Austro-Hungarian authorities work to pin the blame on official Serbia. The result is a procedural thriller set almost entirely in the city, a century after the shots.
It was filmed, unusually, on location in the actual Sarajevo — the quay, the bridge, the 1912-era buildings of the Habsburg city — which gives it a documentary sharpness. The Habsburg-era architecture that a visitor now walks past as a museum is, in this film, the working city of 1914. It premiered on Austrian television in 2014, on the centenary.
For a visitor it is the most direct on-screen route into the single most famous event in the city’s history: what it looked like, street level, on the day the twentieth century started. Walk the corner first, then watch the film, and the pavement acquires its full weight.
Critical reception
The film won the Austrian Adult Education TV Prize for 2014 and premiered on the centenary. Anglophone reception was positive — the Hollywood Reporter praised it as a handsome, well-acted feature — while German critics split on its fictionalised investigation.
Public reception and legacy
Commissioned for the centenary of the First World War, the film premiered on ZDF to 3.37 million viewers, a 10.6% share, and won the 3sat audience award at the Baden-Baden Television Film Festival. Its Austrian counterpart aired on ORF in March 2014, on the centenary of the assassination.
What the critics said
“this handsome-looking and well-acted feature”Read the review →
“"Der Film besitzt nichts von einem Kostümschinken, dafür umso mehr von einem Kammerspiel." ("The film has nothing of a costume epic, all the more of a chamber drama.")”Read the review →