Sarajevo on film 2003 Bosnia and Herzegovina
Summer in the Golden Valley (Ljeto u zlatnoj dolini)
A Sarajevo schoolboy falls into the city's underground to repay his dead father's debt — produced by the director of The Perfect Circle.
- Director
- Srđan Vuletić
- Year
- 2003
- Language
- Bosnian
- Country
- Bosnia and Herzegovina
- Genre
- drama, comedy
Summer in the Golden Valley (Ljeto u zlatnoj dolini) is a coming-of-age story set in the post-war city, in the valley whose golden light gives the film its name. Its hero is a sixteen-year-old Sarajevo schoolboy whose father has died, leaving a debt; to repay it, he and his friend get pulled into the city’s underground — the half-comic, half-dangerous economy of the years after the war. The film is the rare Sarajevo picture that treats the post-war decade as its own subject: not the siege and not the memory, but the messy, money-poor, improvisational city that the war left behind.
It was directed by Srđan Vuletić and produced by Ademir Kenović, the director of The Perfect Circle — the same generation, and the same conviction that the city’s story is worth telling from inside. The old town and the valley are its setting, and its tone is warmer and funnier than most of the war films.
For a visitor, it is the film of the city’s awkward, human survival — the bazaar as a place of commerce and small schemes rather than monuments. Watch it with the war films, and you get the city both ways: what it endured, and how it went on.
Critical reception
The film premiered at the 2003 Sarajevo Film Festival and went on to win the VPRO Tiger Award at Rotterdam in 2004, a Special Jury Award and FIPRESCI Prize at Sofia, and the Golden Iris in Brussels. Variety reviewed it warmly as a striking first feature.
Public reception and legacy
The Tiger Award became the headline of Vuletić’s career: he was named Filmmaker of the Year in Bosnia the following year and opened the 13th Sarajevo Film Festival with his next feature. The Rotterdam catalogue described the film’s post-war Sarajevo as “a no-win, no future Sarajevo” whose young people carry “hopeless dreams”, and its soundtrack, compiled by the Bosnian rapper Edo Maajka, was released as its own album, Zlatna Dolina.
What the critics said
“'Summer in the Golden Valley' is a surprising, angry, sometimes funny first feature about contemporary Bosnia from Srdan Vuletic”Read the review →