Excursion

In Sarajevo, the 15-year-old Iman seeking validation claims that she had sex for the first time during a game of truth or dare among middle schoolers. Trapped in her own lie, she invents a pregnancy and becomes the center of a controversy that spirals out of control.

Excursion, premiered at Locarno Film Festival, was the official submission of Bosnia and Herzegovina for the ‘Best International Feature Film’ category of the 96th Academy Awards in 2024.

EXCURSION | 2023 | 93 min | Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, France, Norway, Qatar

FESTIVALS & AWARDS (SELECTION) 

Locarno International Film Festival, 2023 – World Premiere, Special Mention (Filmmakers of the Present) | European Film Awards, 2023 | Montenegro Film Festival, 2023 – Best Screenplay, Best Actress | Sarajevo Film Festival, 2024 – Ivica Matic Award | Prishtina International Film Festival, 2024 – Best Director | Bosnian submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, 2024

DIRECTOR’S BIO 

Una Gunjak (Sarajevo, 1986) made her directorial debut with the short film The Chicken, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week in 2014 and won the European Film Award for Best Short Film. Her subsequent short film, Salamat, produced in Germany as part of the Lebanon Factory initiative, premiered at Directors’ Fortnight in 2017. Excursion, her first feature film, received support from Eurimages, the Aide au Développement at Cinemed 2019, the Hubert Bals Script and Project Development Fund, and Sorfond in 2021.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

What does ‘becoming a woman’ mean in the current era of post-truth? And what does it entail in today’s society, which has stagnated for 30 years, hoping for a ‘better tomorrow’. We live situated between the old and the new, between the socialist and traditional past on one hand, and modern society on the other. When a few years ago, Bosnia and Herzegovina was shaken by a considerable scandal, where allegedly a group of seven 13-year-old girls from the same class became pregnant during a school trip, the reactions were that of outrage and disbelief. Not merely were the girls judged, accused, and shamed by national media and via digital platforms, but the news about the precocious Bosnian girls reached even the international press. The latter, beating the drum of the local pseudo-moral dogmatic preachers, turned the story into a proper mass hysteria. The truth about what happened really didn’t matter anymore, and that interested me; but what held my attention even more, was the personal truth of these young girls. How are they managing their budding sexuality and what truly motivates their actions and desires in nowadays society? Especially in one so clearly defunct as the Bosnian one.