Paolo Sorrentino used a weekend tribute at the Sarajevo Film Festival to reflect on the impulses that drive his work and the figures that shaped it, while accepting one of the event’s top honors. The Oscar-winning filmmaker received the festival’s Honorary Heart and sat for a packed masterclass on August 17, where he spoke about craft, politics, and his personal history. The appearance comes days before his new feature La Grazia opens the Venice Film Festival on August 27.
Festival organizers paired the award with a retrospective, situating Sorrentino among this year’s headline guests that include actors Willem Dafoe, Ray Winstone, and Stellan Skarsgård. Sarajevo’s 31st edition is screening more than 200 titles across multiple strands, with juries led by Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa.
Onstage, Sorrentino described his films as emotion-led puzzles assembled with “tricks” of image, music, and performance, adding that he prizes speed on set and a touch of imperfection. He also addressed current events, saying he agrees with those who characterize the devastation in Gaza as genocide and that no film can stop such violence.
He revisited autobiographical touchstones, saying movies “saved” his “sad life,” a theme closely tied to Naples and his lifelong admiration for Diego Maradona. The director has often linked the football legend to a turning point in his youth; that influence surfaced again in Sarajevo alongside his view that he avoids depictions where characters “suffer too much.”
The festival placement also frames what comes next. La Grazia, his Venice opener, reunites him with Toni Servillo and returns Sorrentino to a stage where he first competed in 2001. For Sarajevo audiences, the masterclass threaded his public persona—wry, elliptical, unsentimental—through the concerns that recur in his films, from faith and power to private grief.
