A group of spunky seniors launch an armed rebellion against the employees of their retirement home, where they’ve been subjected to years of abuse and humiliation. Abandoned by their loved ones and left with nothing to lose, they stage an insurrection that grabs headlines, shocks the country — and proves that it’s never too late to find something worth fighting for.
A dark comedy from homegrown filmmaker Dino Mustafić, “The Pavilion” opens this year’s Sarajevo Film Festival on Friday. It is written by Viktor Ivančić and co-written by Emir Imamović Pirke and features an ensemble cast of regional talents including Rade Šerbedžija, Zijah Sokolović, Miralem Zubčević, Ksenija Pajić and Jasna Diklić.
“The Pavilion” marks Mustafić’s return to fiction filmmaking more than two decades after his debut, “Remake,” premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival. An accomplished theater director and documentarian, who served as artistic director of drama at the National Theatre Sarajevo, Mustafić tells Variety that the film brought him back to “the space where I can explore the deepest layers of human relationships.”
“After more than two decades of working in theater and documentaries, I felt the urge to return to a longer cinematic form, one that allows me to build characters layer by layer,” he says.
“The Pavilion” begins in the halls of its eponymous retirement home, where the elderly residents are constantly subjected to the casual cruelty of medical personnel and the increasing decline of basic services as they wait out their twilight years. When the humiliation finally becomes too much to bear, they use a cache of weapons smuggled into the facility to seize the management and staff as hostages, a move that sets off a media frenzy and rattles the political elite in a fraught election year.
Suddenly, a new order takes hold in Pavilion, whose fed-up residents grow increasingly divided between their desire to be treated with dignity and their thirst for revenge. As tensions rise, the film pushes toward an inevitable showdown and a surprising climax, as the seniors demonstrate that in a country that casts aside its oldest and most vulnerable citizens, only a shocking spectacle can satisfy their demands to be seen and heard.
“What drew me to ‘Pavilion’ was its blend of the intimate and the political,” Mustafić tells Variety ahead of the film’s premiere. “It’s not just a story about a nursing home, but about a society that slowly pushes to the margins those it no longer deems ‘useful.’ I wanted to show how, even in those forgotten spaces, humor, solidarity and even rebellion can still emerge — and how dignity never stops being a human need, no matter the age.”
From the film’s opening sequences, the elderly residents of Pavilion are underestimated, expected to passively submit to abuse and neglect without putting up a fight. Yet Ivančić and Pirke’s script quickly subverts any expectations of quiet acquiescence; their characters not only outsmart and overpower their tormentors at every turn, but they’re infused with bawdy humor and sexual desire, something that Mustafić describes as “a political statement against ageism” in a culture that denies the existence of basic human needs in individuals as they grow old.
“We live in societies that fear ageing and often push it out of sight. When we distance ourselves from our parents or elders, we are really distancing ourselves from our own future,” he says. “I hope audiences take away the idea that dignity is not a luxury, but a right. And that it is never too late for love, for resistance, for laughter — even at the last station of life.”
The gallows humor employed throughout “The Pavilion” will be familiar to longtime followers of Balkan cinema, with the Bosnian Mustafić noting that “in my country, comedy is often the only way to survive reality.”
“It opens the door to empathy, even when we’re talking about the heaviest experiences,” he says. “The dark humor in ‘Pavilion’ doesn’t make the subject less serious — it reminds us that even in the darkest corners, life, laughter and human warmth can survive.”
“The Pavilion” is produced by Bosnia’s Panglas, in co-production with Croatia’s Cineplanet, North Macedonia’s Krug Film, Serbia’s Monte Royal Pictures, Montenegro’s Natenane Productions and Bosnia’s Realstage. The producers are Mustafa Mustafić, Ishak Jalimam and Rusmir Efendić.
The director describes its selection as curtain-riser of the Sarajevo Film Festival as both “an honor” and “a deeply emotional moment,” with a full house expected to greet Mustafić on opening night. “This is my city, my audience,” he says, “and it feels like the film is finally coming home.”
The Sarajevo Film Festival runs Aug. 15 – 22.
