Aljuš Musli, a Macedonian-born Albanian man who moved to Bijeljina in present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina, devoted his life to creating his own films in the style of Hollywood westerns before disappearing during the wars in the Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The locals in Bijeljina, however, knew him by a different name, Hari Džekson – that is, his adopted moniker, “Harry Jackson”. Dublin-based photographer Dragana Jurišić – whose own connection to Bijeljina originates in her family home, which burnt down during the wars – takes his legacy as a starting point for her debut documentary, The Balkan Cowboy.

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Jurišić’s film fits comfortably within the world premieres in Sarajevo’s Documentary Competition, which regularly features works that seek to reinvent the region’s brutal ethnonationalist conflicts. The movie unfolds as part-author journey, part-tribute film, part-anti-nationalist statement and part-historical documentary, and her mix of approaches is notably dynamic, even if it suffers from feeling thematically scattered, partly as a result. The filmmaker works with the meta-narrative of creating a western (short film) in honour of Hari – in Bijeljina, she stages auditions and meets a set of generous and intriguing residents along the way – which she then delivers to the viewer at the end of the film.

It becomes clear what Hari represents in this town, or at least Jurišić successfully frames what he symbolises: the imaginary of a bygone time where a creative, communally orientated spirit was dominant over exclusionary tensions and divides. “That’s what nationalism does: it kills good people, and it kills the good in people,” the filmmaker asserts solemnly in voice-over, if not a bit didactically, a sentiment echoed in different forms by many people she meets. The Balkan Cowboy begins to create an interesting juxtaposition between the largely cut-and-dried battle of good versus evil in westerns and the complex moral landscape of war, but it stops short of fully delivering this commentary.

The film’s biggest stumbling block is a lack of archival footage of Hari’s films or of himself, leaving many unanswered questions about who he was; Jurišić turns to her reflexive story of local encounters to fill this gap. Her journey to understand Hari’s life includes an eerie sequence where she bails on meeting a warlord – in her words – who got away with myriad murders, one amongst many in ex-Yugoslavia who achieved such a fate. Jurišić quietly reveals the horrors simmering underneath her story, but the filmmaker clearly does not intend to move the movie in such a dark direction and thus abstains from diving in further.

After all, she is more intent on discovering the humanity that remains, flourishing on ground that saw the devastation of conflict. While never overly light in tone, The Balkan Cowboy leaves viewers with a flavour of Yugoslav history and on a hopeful note. A refrain gradually floats to the surface: maybe the real Balkan cowboy film was the friends we made along the way.

The Balkan Cowboy is a production by Ireland’s Invisible Thread Films and Croatia’s Restart.