The guest of honor of the 31st Sarajevo Film Festival, Paolo Sorrentino, offered audiences a generous masterclass, full of passion, reflections and food for thoughts.
Just days before opening the 82nd Venice Film Festival with his latest film La Grazia (2025), Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino appeared at the 31st Sarajevo Film Festival as its guest of honor. He was celebrated with the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo, an award recognizing his outstanding contribution to world cinema, and his visit was accompanied by special screenings of his work—both earlier titles and more recent films—offering audiences a rare chance to rediscover the range of his artistry on the big screen. And his masterclass in Sarajevo proved to be no less graceful than the very title of La Grazia: poised, elegant, ironic, and at times provocatively casual, yet always captivating. Known worldwide for films such as Il Divo (2008), La Grande Bellezza (2013), Youth (2015) and others, Sorrentino did not lecture so much as perform—slightly irreverent, tinged with irony, dismissive at times, yet disarmingly warm. His presence on stage felt less like a lesson in cinema than a carefully unpolished confession about life, obsession, and the inevitability of time.
Characters first, everything else later
When asked how a film begins, Sorrentino brushed aside the notion of grand concepts or thematic manifestos. For him, it always starts with characters—people he has loved, admired, or simply noticed. He “falls in love” with them, he admitted, and only later do images, locations, and visual landscapes emerge. Cinema, for him, is never planned as a career trajectory. “When I finish my homework, I go to play,” he said with a sly smile. “And with films—when I have time and money, I play.”
It is a philosophy that resists the pressure of ambition. He is not interested in crafting a legacy or building a monument. Instead, his films are born from obsessions, the small but persistent echoes of life that refuse to let him go.
Time, football, Church, politics and the mafia…
Again and again, Sorrentino returned to the question of time. Not as theory, not as metaphor, but as something that presses on daily life. Time passes too quickly, it leaves us unprepared, it defeats us without a fight. And yet, he insisted, within this inevitability there are moments of grace—when people dance, when they forget themselves, when joy becomes stronger than fear. “That is beauty,” he said. “And the mistake is always the same: we decide to stop while the music is still playing.”
If time brings sadness into his films, football brings energy and joy. When he spoke about Diego Maradona, his tone changed completely. It was no longer ironic; it was almost religious. At fourteen, standing in the stadium in Naples, he saw Maradona play and understood, for the first time, what a true spectacle could be. That moment, he confessed, shaped him more than any book or film. Football remains for him not just a passion, but a necessity, something without which life would lose its rhythm. The same is true of music: it lifts his work, convinces him that what he is creating might hold real power.
And then there are what he calls the three great pillars of his cinema: the church, politics, and the mafia. Themes so deeply rooted in Italian life that they cannot be ignored, so alive with contradictions that they continue to inspire him after decades of filmmaking. To these he adds two more obsessions—football and love. Together they form the ground on which his cinema stands, subjects he never tires of revisiting, precisely because they are never exhausted.
Cinema cannot save the world
What Sorrentino does not care for is violence. He finds it tiring, even boring. His characters may suffer, but never excessively, never gratuitously. His preference, instead, is for irony, that delicate tool he absorbed from Fellini. With irony, one can capture absurdity without cruelty, reveal tragedy without falling into darkness. In this, Sorrentino remains an optimist at heart, closer to Walt Disney than to horror.
And yet, he insists, cinema cannot save the world. “There is no film that can stop genocide,” he noted, almost offhand, as though stating a law of nature. Films may not prevent history’s horrors, but they can offer something else: a fragile, shared experience, a fleeting sense of recognition.
About cynicism
Perhaps his most tender reflection came when he spoke about cynicism. Cynical people, he suggested, are often the most sensitive of all. Cynicism, he argued, is nothing but a mask—a way to shield oneself from the terror of living fully. Beneath the mask lies fragility, the very thing that makes people worth filming.
Passion and humility
Leaving the Sarajevo hall, it was clear that Sorrentino had offered advice for aspiring filmmakers. What he delivered was something rarer: a philosophy of life, one rooted in obsession, irony, and the refusal to over-explain. His films, he believes, should not provide answers. Instead, they should place us in a state of confusion, even discomfort—only then can cinema become beautiful, only then can it surprise.
Sorrentino does not claim to know how cinema works, nor does he want to. For him, filmmaking is a way of brushing against life’s mysteries, of preserving its absurdity and its grace. In Sarajevo, Paolo Sorrentino reminded us that the art of cinema is nothing more—and nothing less—than the art of continuing to dance, even when time insists it is time to stop.
We are delighted to be attending the 31st Sarajevo Film Festival in person, taking place August 15–22, 2025.
