Yugo Florida

An emotional, often darkly humorous drama of a son caring for his unbearable father in his final weeks. Andrija Kuzmanović won the Heart of Sarajevo for his portrayal of a man struggling to unlearn a lifetime of emotional avoidance, with both the humour and the pathos of a life quietly surrendered.

Zoran is an exhausted, apathetic night-shift worker who monitors sleeping contestants of a reality TV show. He has long given up on himself, living a life of quiet resignation. His awkward, almost pointless existence suddenly shifts when his father is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Committing to help him through his final weeks, they drive around in an old Yugo Florida, gradually getting to know each other in ways that many Serbian men never do – sharing feelings and vulnerabilities that had been suppressed for decades in a culture where emotional openness is prohibited for men.

Though a work of fiction, the film possesses an almost documentary-like precision in its portrayal of personal failure, familial estrangement, and societal inertia. It functions as a sharp vivisection of the country’s entrenched habits, social commonplaces, and emotional stagnation.

Programme section: Cinema Current / Focus: Grief
Original title: Yugo Florida | Year: 2025 | Duration: 112′
Country: Montenegro, Italy, France, Croatia, Serbia | Language: Montenegrin, Italian, French | Subtitles: English
Director: Vladimir Tagić | Production: Marija Stojanović – Sense Production; Contrast Films, Eclectica, Le Belle Affaire Production, Adriatic Western | Cast: Andrija Kuzmanović, Nikola Pejaković, Hana Selimović, Snježana Sinovčić | Screenplay: Milan Ramšak Marković, Vladimir Tagić | Cinematography: Aleksandar Karaulić | Editing: Dragan von Petrović

FESTIVALS & AWARDS (SELECTION) 

Sarajevo Film Festival, 2025 – World Premiere; Heart of Sarajevo Award for Best Actor (Andrija Kuzmanović) | Montenegro Film Festival, 2025 – Golden Mimosa for Best Actor

DIRECTOR’S BIO 

Vladimir Tagić is best known as the creator, writer, and director of the award-winning hit television show “Operation Sabre”, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024, where it won the Special Interpretation Award. His previous TV series, “Morning Changes Everything”, was a great regional hit in Ex-Yugoslavia and was presented in the Avant Premiere programme at the Sarajevo Film Festival in 2018. His short film “Emergency Exit” premiered at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival and was presented in the ACID programme at the Cannes Film Festival. 

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

This is the most personal story I have written. My father fell ill in 2015, and several months before he died, he wanted me to take him to a monastery to make a confession. What was strange was that he had been a communist and atheist his entire life; he didn’t even baptise me, and I can’t say that he had ever developed an attitude towards religion. One November morning, he probably overslept for the first time in his life, and we were late, so he was agitated. We sat in his run-down Yugo with me behind the wheel, the car wasn’t fully functional, and the road was icy. That morning was probably the saddest, funniest and most absurd morning of my life.