Agata the Writer Review: Cultural Theft Becomes a Formal Experiment

The central provocation in Agata the Writer is brutally simple: what gives an artist the right to turn someone else’s catastrophe into material? Kuba Dorabialski builds his feature around that question by sending Agata (Mia Wasikowska), a Polish-Australian novelist, from Sydney to Sarajevo.

She has built a career on comic fiction and now wants to write something heavier, a father-daughter story tied to the Bosnian War. Her Polish background lets her understand fragments of the local language, and she carries a faint sense that shared Slavic roots might grant her some cultural proximity.

Sarajevo quickly dismantles that assumption.The sharpest challenge comes from Jasmina (Vedrana Božinović), a theater director who treats Agata’s research project with barely concealed contempt. When Agata asks if she “enjoyed” the war years, Jasmina cuts through the phrasing immediately: it was genocide.

Later, she questions why Agata has travelled across Europe to mine Bosnia rather than confront violence closer to her own history. Those conversations make the film far sharper than a standard portrait of writer’s block. Agata is not struggling to find words. She is struggling to justify having them.

Sarajevo Refuses the Role

Dorabialski’s Sarajevo is gray, cold, and stubbornly resistant to romanticization. Static compositions frame misty streets, concrete apartment blocks, mountain roads, and half-empty public spaces. Wind seems to persist across scenes like an acoustic residue the city cannot quite shake.

Agata keeps trying to turn this environment into research, and the people she meets keep refusing the transaction. One interviewee explains that she has recounted her trauma so many times that the performance has become automatic. She knows where to pause. She knows which details produce the expected response. The admission punctures the fantasy that testimony remains untouched every time an outsider arrives with a notebook.

Wasikowska handles Agata’s discomfort through tiny physical shifts. Her speech becomes hesitant. Her posture tightens. She listens with the expression of someone realizing that intellectual curiosity can still produce ethical clumsiness. The performance never begs the audience to excuse her.

Her scenes with Davina (Mia Morrissey), her friend and editor, operate differently. Davina offers encouragement and familiarity, giving Agata relief from the confrontational atmosphere surrounding the interviews. Their warmth also exposes the distance between publishing logic and lived history.

From one side, the book is a promising project. From the other, it is another outsider arriving to extract shape from suffering. That clash gives the film its strongest cultural argument. Representation is treated here as an act with consequences, not an abstract debate about artistic freedom.

Theft and Ownership

A stranger subplot begins quietly inside the house where Agata is staying. Objects disappear. Among them are aggressively obscene artworks, including a large painting of a woman defecating and a vase shaped like feces. The imagery is juvenile enough to be funny and strange enough to become useful.

Someone is literally removing art from the house while Agata worries that her own work may amount to another form of taking. The parallel is not subtle, yet Dorabialski wisely refuses to turn the thefts into a conventional mystery. There are no satisfying clues, no reveal waiting behind a locked door.

The oddness continues during an interview with an elderly widower whose home contains pornographic and scatological imagery. Jasmina leaves furious, concerned that Agata will treat such details as representative of Bosnia. Her anger exposes one of the film’s most difficult questions: a visitor can collect authentic details and still create a false portrait. This is where the film’s humor becomes useful. The ridiculousness of the objects keeps the argument from hardening into a lecture, while Jasmina’s reaction shows how quickly observation can become distortion.

The Book Takes Over

Then Dorabialski makes his most divisive choice. The Sarajevo narrative largely stops. Wasikowska appears in a dark space, facing the camera, and begins reading Agata’s manuscript for an extended stretch. The chapter, titled “The Responsibility,” follows Janek, a widowed boom operator living in France with his daughter. Dorabialski himself plays Janek in the sparse images accompanying the text.

The formal shift is severe. Characters vanish. The thefts remain unresolved. Jasmina and Davina lose the space they had occupied. What had functioned as a conversational drama starts resembling a gallery installation or staged literary reading.

The manuscript itself contains descriptions of cuts, camera positions, locations, and images, so the supposed novel begins to sound suspiciously like cinema. Agata’s book, Dorabialski’s film, and Janek’s story start bleeding into one another.

That move sharpens the film’s argument about authorship. Agata cannot comfortably possess Sarajevo, so her writing drifts away from direct historical reconstruction and toward another mediated story. Dorabialski places himself inside that process too, refusing the convenient fiction that the filmmaker sits outside the ethical problem being examined.

The price is dramatic momentum. Wasikowska’s controlled delivery holds attention, but the extended reading drains energy from relationships the film has spent an hour building. The rupture works better as an idea than as drama.

Still, the awkwardness has purpose. Agata the Writer refuses to provide the clean cultural portrait its protagonist initially seeks. Sarajevo will not become background decoration, its survivors will not become tidy sources, and the film itself eventually stops pretending that observation is innocent. What remains is a work suspicious of the very act that created it.

Agata the Writer had its world premiere at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on September 6, 2026. The comedy-drama follows an Australian-Polish novelist who travels to Sarajevo to write a war story, only to face heavy scrutiny from local residents questioning her creative motives.

Full Credits

• Title: Agata the Writer

• Distributor: Screen Australia, Production Productions, Whitefalk Films

• Release date: September 6, 2026 (Venice International Film Festival)

• Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes

• Director: Kuba Dorabialski

• Writers: Kuba Dorabialski

• Producers and Executive Producers: Alex White

• Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Vedrana Božinović, Selma Alispahić, Mia Morrissey, Admir Glamočak, Zoran Jevtic, Hatidža Ćorić

• Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Kuba Dorabialski

• Editors: Kuba Dorabialski

• Composer: Kuba Dorabialski