Filmmakers Teona Mitevska and Céline Sciamma will launch Sister Sister at the Sarajevo Film Festival, an initiative intended to strengthen women’s roles across the film and television industries. It aims to create a more inclusive, sustainable and assertive audiovisual sector, particularly by encouraging collaboration between women working in different screen professions. The initiative matters because it seeks to turn discussion of structural barriers and creative authorship into practical recommendations and a shared manifesto.

Its first event will be a think tank involving female filmmakers, producers, writers and academics from the former Yugoslavia, focused on the future of women’s authorship in regional cinema. Participants will hold three moderated roundtables to identify challenges, exchange experiences and develop proposals for change. Mitevska, a prominent North Macedonian director whose film “Mother” opened Venice’s Horizons section last year, conceived the project with Sarajevo programmer Asja Krsmanović after discussing frustrations over being defined by others.