Sarajevo on film 1975 Yugoslavia
The Day That Shook the World (Atentat u Sarajevu)
The 1975 Yugoslav epic that dramatised the 1914 assassination at scale — a state-sponsored account of the shot that started the century.
- Director
- Veljko Bulajić
- Year
- 1975
- Language
- Serbo-Croatian
- Country
- Yugoslavia
- Genre
- historical, drama
The Day That Shook the World (Atentat u Sarajevu) is the largest-budget film ever made about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and it was made by the state that the events had helped to dismantle. Veljko Bulajić’s 1975 Yugoslav production was a genuinely international affair — a Yugoslav-UK-Czechoslovak co-production with a cast including Christopher Plummer as the Archduke, Florinda Bolkan, Maximilian Schell, and Edward Woodward. It reconstructs the entire context of 28 June 1914: the visit, the bomb that missed, the conspirators’ despair, and the fatal second attempt on the corner by the Latin Bridge.
For the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1975, the film was also a political statement: an official, sympathetic account of the Young Bosnians and Gavrilo Princip, presented as the act of young people against an empire. The state sponsored the film as a statement of Yugoslav identity — the same identity that would fall apart, a generation later, in the very city where the film is set.
For a visitor, it is the historical heavyweight among the Sarajevo films: the assassination at full scale, with period reconstruction, set against the Habsburg-era city that is now the old town’s museum quarter. It pairs naturally with the Sarajevo (2014) retelling — the epic and the procedural, both ending at the same corner.
Critical reception
The film was Yugoslavia’s entry for the 1976 Academy Awards and won a Special Mention at San Sebastián and a Silver Arena at Pula. The one substantial English-language review was the New York Times’, which was unimpressed.
Public reception and legacy
Released in Yugoslavia in October 1975, the film was a state-studio co-production across four republics and played across Europe before reaching American screens through AIP in 1977. Its legacy is scale — the largest-budget account of the assassination ever made, with Christopher Plummer as the archduke — and the state politics that underwrote it: an official, sympathetic telling of the Young Bosnians’ act, filmed by the state that the events had helped to create.
What the critics said
“Despite an awesome title, 'The Day That Shook the World,' which arrived at the Festival yesterday, is more quaint than explosive.”Read the review →