Swedish director Ruben Östlund will receive the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo Award at the 28th Sarajevo Film Festival and his latest film Triangle of Sadness, winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes festival, will open the festival.

The Honorary Heart of Sarajevo will be presented to Östlund on August 12th at the Festival Opening Ceremony, before the screening of the film Triangle of Sadness.

Östlund was the president of the Jury of the Competition Programme – Feature Film of the 25th Sarajevo Film Festival.

Triangle of Sadness is a satire that reveals roles and classes: Carl and Yaya, a couple of models, go through the excitement of Milan Fashion Week before arriving on an exclusive yacht cruise in the Caribbean. There are well-to-do passengers on board and the ship is maintained flawlessly. Bad weather results in seasickness, and then the situation worsens with an epidemic of food poisoning, and shipwreck. Paradise turns into a nightmarish metaphor for the end of Western civilization.

Harris Dickinson, Charlbi Dean, Woody Harrelson, Vicki Berlin, Henrik Dorsin, Zlatko Buric, Jean-Christophe Folly, Iris Berben, Dolly De Leon, Sunnyi Melles, Amanda Walker, Oliver Ford Davies, Arvin Kananian, Carolina Gynning and Ralph Schicha starred in the film.

Ruben Östlund was born in 1974 in Sweden. His first feature, The Guitar Mongoloid, won the FIPRESCI Award at the 2005 Moscow Film Festival. Beginning with his second feature film, Involuntary, which premiered as part of the Un Certain Regard programme, all of Östlund’s films were screened in Cannes. He won the Golden Bear in Berlin with the short film Incident by a Bank. Östlund’s third feature film, PLAY, premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight program of the Cannes Film Festival, where he won the Coup de Coeur award and received nominations for the European Parliament’s LUX Award and the most prestigious Scandinavian film award, the Nordic Prize. His fourth feature film, Force Majeure, premiered as part of the Un Certain Regard programme at the Cannes Film Festival, where he won the Jury Award. The film was nominated for the Golden Globe Award and was shortlisted for the Oscar® Award. Östlund’s fifth feature film, The Square, won the Palme d ‘Or at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Oscar® for Best Foreign Language Film.

The 28th Sarajevo Film Festival will be held from August 12th to the 19th, 2022.

^{Ruben Östlund image credit: Frankie Fouganthin via Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license}