We caught up with Croatian artist, photographer and filmmaker Dragana Jurišić at the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival, where her feature-length documentary The Balkan Cowboy had its world premiere in the Competition Programme – Documentary Film.

The film takes Jurišić to Bijeljina in Bosnia and Herzegovina in search of Hari Džekson, born Aljuš Musli, a local photographer, rebel and cult amateur filmmaker who made his own westerns with the people around him. Recreating a western in his spirit with today’s inhabitants of Bijeljina, Jurišić gradually pieces together the story of Džekson, the city before and after the war, and her own relationship with the country she left behind. She discusses using the naivety, clear division between good and evil, and kitsch of the western genre to approach the legacy of the 1990s, as well as turning auditions, encounters with local people and the filmmaking process itself into material for the documentary.