The Balkan Cowboy Review: Hollywood Dreams on Bosnian Ground

During auditions in Bijeljina, a prospective performer compares Bosnians to the Native Americans of old westerns. He recognizes displacement in a genre another audience might associate with heroic conquest. Dragana Jurišić is gathering local people to make a short western in honour of Hari Džekson, the photographer and amateur filmmaker who once recruited his neighbours for cowboy adventures. Her documentary, The Balkan Cowboy, lets the casting process become a conversation about the lives people bring to these borrowed roles. An American screen tradition supplies a vocabulary for experiences its original stories could scarcely have anticipated.

Džekson had already made that vocabulary his own. Born Aljuš Musli, he adopted a name that sounded like Harry Jackson and shot low-budget western shorts in this town in what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina. His casts crossed ethnic divisions, with Roma participants taking Native American roles. There is an awkwardness here that the documentary leaves insufficiently examined. A filmmaking practice could welcome people while assigning them identities inherited from Hollywood’s stereotypes. The later auditionee’s identification with dispossessed people gives the borrowing another meaning, without making those separate histories interchangeable or erasing the assumptions built into the roles.

Jurišić turns to Shane for her tribute, incorporating clips that bring its territorial conflict into contact with her own concerns about home. This is a productive comparison because she puts the reference to work: a familiar western becomes material for a new production in Bijeljina. Džekson’s films promised that justice would arrive and good would defeat evil. For people whose lives were broken by the Yugoslav Wars, such certainty carries an attraction that can coexist with disbelief. Playing out a just ending offers something history has failed to provide, though the performance cannot make that ending true outside the film.

The director’s connection to Džekson runs through her father, whose interest in photography he helped cultivate. Her family home in Slavonski Brod, now in Croatia, was destroyed during the wars, taking her father’s prints and negatives with it. Surviving documentary footage shows Jurišić as a teenager in the ruined house. Its presence gives her first-person account a weight that commentary alone could not supply. She is visible inside the history she is trying to recover. Now living in Ireland, she returns with the experience of someone whose country of origin no longer exists in the form she remembers.

That personal connection also shapes the documentary’s largest limitation. Džekson’s wife Bahra and other acquaintances help establish his importance to those around him, but the scarcity of footage of the man and his work makes his artistic personality harder to grasp. We learn why people remember him; we have less opportunity to discover how he arranged a scene or made his particular version of a western. Jurišić’s encounters gradually take over the space a fuller encounter with his films might have occupied. This gives her documentary a living social world while leaving its absent filmmaker unusually dependent on what others need him to represent.

Fatima and Zekija give that social world its richest detail. Wartime displacement separated the two friends, sending Fatima first to Germany and then to the United States. They still spend hours speaking by telephone, and Fatima returns for months at a time. Their friendship makes exile measurable through the effort required to sustain an ordinary intimacy. The calls and visits preserve something that war and displacement put under strain. Jurišić allows their attachment to retain its practical character: staying close involves time, travel, and the repeated decision to keep talking.

Lawyer Duško Tomić introduces a different kind of continuing obligation. Recalling the killing of Bosniak civilians beside the Drina, he condemns the failure of his own community to condemn the crime. His testimony unsettles the idea that ethnic belonging dictates a single response to the past. Beside the documentary’s treatment of the violence in Bijeljina and Ron Haviv’s photographic record, his words also expose the distance between recording an atrocity and securing accountability. Džekson’s western justice begins to look painfully remote from a world in which evidence can survive while punishment fails to follow.

Jurišić is less effective when her voice-over converts these encounters into explicit statements about nationalism. The people have already given the argument its force; the commentary can narrow the range of responses their accounts invite. A planned meeting with a man she identifies as an unpunished warlord, abandoned before it takes place, opens another line of inquiry that receives little development. Her withdrawal is understandable. The documentary still incurs a structural cost, raising the prospect of confronting impunity before returning to its tribute. Its historical investigation remains less developed than its effort to recover human contact.

The filmmaking passages work because they give that effort an activity around which people can gather. Auditions make room for humour and self-presentation alongside painful recollections. Participants can become prospective actors, with parts to pursue and a production to join. NC Lawlor’s Americana-style music accompanies this borrowing with another: an Irish musician supplies an American idiom for a film returning to a Bosnian town. The western belongs here through use. Its forms are available to people whose lives have given them different reasons to care about its promises.

At the ranch run by Darka and his father, the tribute becomes a shared undertaking among people from different ethnic communities. Jurišić can show cooperation taking place without establishing how long it will last beyond the production. The identical twin brothers cast as opponents give this activity a particularly uneasy humour.

Their resemblance makes the division into enemies visibly artificial, though it cannot explain the violence recalled elsewhere. Within the short, antagonism is a role they agree to perform together. The completed western gives their staged opposition a place inside a collaborative work, made on ground where the consequences of actual division remain.

The Balkan Cowboy had its world premiere at the Sarajevo Film Festival on August 17, 2026. Directed by Irish-based visual artist Dragana Jurišić, the evocative feature documentary follows the filmmaker as she returns to the Bosnian town of Bijeljina to stage a film honoring cult amateur Western movie director Hari Džekson, exploring regional trauma and confronting ghosts of her war-torn childhood through the cinematic lens of the American West.

Full Credits

• Title: The Balkan Cowboy

• Distributor: Invisible Thread Films, Restart

• Release date: August 17, 2026 (Sarajevo Film Festival)

• Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes (93 minutes)

• Director: Dragana Jurišić

• Writers: Dragana Jurišić

• Producers and Executive Producers: Zlata Filipović, Anna Rodgers, Oliver Sertić

• Cast: Dragana Jurišić

• Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Eleanor Bowman

• Editors: Paul Mullen

• Composer: Michael Fleming