CineLink Books Expands Its Focus to New Literary Forms and Screen Adaptation Potential
Established three years ago, CineLink Books was created with the aim of exploring the potential of regional intellectual property on the international market and strengthening connections between the publishing and audiovisual sectors. The programme was developed as a platform for dialogue among writers, publishers, producers, and industry professionals, with a focus on identifying contemporary literary works from the region that hold strong potential for film and television adaptation.
Responding to the growing international interest in IP-driven content and the increasing demand for original stories, CineLink Books introduced a dedicated presentation format in which selected novels from the region of the former Yugoslavia are presented to established regional and international producers. The programme aims to create new pathways for stories to move from page to screen, while increasing the visibility of contemporary regional literature within the global creative industry.
As part of the CineLink Talks programme, Sarajevo Film Festival will also welcome acclaimed Swedish crime writer and screenwriter Camilla Läckberg. Internationally renowned for her bestselling Fjällbacka crime series, with more than 29 million copies sold worldwide and translations in over 60 countries, Läckberg has recently expanded her work into film and television, most notably as the creator and screenwriter of the Netflix series The Glass Dome (Glaskupan).
Following two successful editions, CineLink Books has expanded its scope to include plays, recognising the significant potential of this literary form for adaptation and its unique potential to translate human relationships, dialogue, and dramatic structures into cinematic language. The addition of works for the stage opens new opportunities for discovering stories that can move naturally between theatre and film, creating another bridge between different creative sectors.
This year, CineLink Books and Plays presents seven novels and two plays by contemporary regional authors, spanning a wide range of genres and themes. The selected works are represented by publishers from some of the most prestigious publishing houses in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia, offering international producers a diverse selection of stories with strong adaptation potential.
Hena, Croatia, 2022
64
Tena Štivičić
Tena Štivičić’s 64 is a play about women, men, children, and parents. Nature has designed these relationships in the most fundamental way, yet every era continuously reshapes and redefines them. In the play, a young married couple examines their roles within partnership and family relationships, with a particular focus on whether having children is a biological or social imperative. The already difficult decision to become parents is further complicated by the process of medically assisted reproduction, whose outcome remains highly uncertain. This uncertainty gradually affects their marriage as well as other relationships within the family.
Location : Festival Garden
Bosnian National Theatre, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2023
Babylon Blues
Dario Bevanda
After serving seven years and five months in prison, petty criminal Isak Jaganjac, known as Isko, is granted a one-day prison leave. On the hottest day of the year, he visits his brother, his mother, his ex-girlfriend, and former associates. Much has changed during his absence, and it soon becomes clear that no one really needs him anymore. The prospect of returning to life outside the prison walls no longer seems as appealing as he once imagined. As the hours pass, Isko sets out to find someone to blame for the course his life has taken. As the time to return to prison draws closer, however, his search narrows, tensions mount, and the sweltering heat rises to a fever pitch.
Location : Festival Garden
Naklada Ljevak, Croatia, 2026
Byways: Crossroads of Blood / Stranputice
Vedran Mavrović
Multi-award-winning author Vedran Mavrović (Artefakt, SFera) uses the framework of dark fantasy and mythological elements as a method of exploration rather than as an escape from reality. Through symbolism and narrative metaphor, Byways: Crossroads of Blood novel addresses violence and its consequences, the position of women in closed communities, the mechanisms of accusation and collective forgetting, the relationship between the individual and the collective, and the question of choice versus determinism. The story takes the reader to a remote mountain village where sacred animals and fire gods are worshipped, focusing on a young tavern keeper who, through conflict with the community, uncovers a dark secret and is forced to confront violence and shame, with consequences that threaten to tear the community apart. This premise introduces a layer that strongly resonates with our present moment: a depiction of pandemic uncertainty and collective paranoia.
Location : Festival Garden
Imprimatur, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2020
Diagnosis / Dijagnoza
Nada Kaurin Knežević
Diagnosis is a collection of ten interlinked stories - one hundred chapters, one hundred diagnoses of contemporary life - that borrows the international classification of mental disorders (F00-F99) as its scaffolding, then tells you nothing about illness and everything about silence, the polite lie, and the cracks running through outwardly orderly lives. Not one story describes a clinical condition. Instead each dissects a state of modern society: a marriage long dead but kept alive for appearances; an obsessive pursuit of a child that devours everything except the couple itself; a childhood lived under a quiet violence the adults refuse to see; a family whose love for their son curdles into the slow destruction of his partner; a city that steps around a young man collapsed on a tram; a love built from nicknames, songs, and a single held hand; a marriage consumed by its own endless conversation; a circle of friends who broadcast the lie of happiness far louder than the truth.
The stories are minimalist and dialogue-driven; the truth never announces itself, it waits in what goes unsaid. Moving through Zagreb, Dalmatia, and Bosnia, Diagnosis does what its title promises - it identifies, quietly and without mercy, the conditions we have all agreed not to name.
Location : Festival Garden
Laguna, Serbia, 2024
A Laudable Threesome / Svetlo trojstvo
Marijana Čanak
In her early thirties, as her life begins to settle into a familiar rhythm, Dora questions love, intimacy, and the nature of partnership. Caught between Vasil and Vigor, she makes an unexpected choice — one that surprises even herself, defies convention, provokes, unsettles, and inspires both open envy and quiet admiration. Told through three alternating voices, A Laudable Threesome is an erotic novel about breaking free from convention in order to remain true to oneself — the ultimate act of freedom. A bold exploration of polyamory, it is, at its heart, a novel about fidelity.
Location : Festival Garden
Fraktura, Croatia, 2026
Nietzsche from Trešnjevka
/ Nietzsche sa Trešnjevke
Kristijan Vujičić
Albert Šnajder, a graduate economist and former spokesperson for a publishing house, is fifty years old. He lives in an inherited apartment in Trešnjevka, shares his home with his cat Schopenhauer, and works as a caretaker at the Vesela Starost nursing home. He fixes pipes, listens to the residents’ stories and sorrows, and spends his evenings in a basement room writing a play about his favourite philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, convinced that words can still save him. Then, unexpectedly, his life begins to shift. He meets Tara, the granddaughter of one of the home’s residents, and finds himself trembling with the excitement of a young man. At the same time, the director of the nursing home disrupts his everyday life, while also opening up the possibility for Albert to prove himself as a director and writer. For the home’s theatre production, Albert gathers a gallery of unforgettable characters. At once humorous and bittersweet, philosophically profound yet deeply human, Nietzsche from Trešnjevka is a novel about unfulfilled dreams, love found where it is least expected, aging, dignity, moments of warmth, and the belief that philosophy is never futile, and that kindness always finds its reward.
Location : Festival Garden
Buybook, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2026
Radio Sarajevo
Tijan Sila
When the first shell falls, Tijan is ten years old. The life he has known vanishes irretrievably, and the smell of burning gunpowder remains forever etched in his memory. Reality falls apart at the seams; what follows is not only crueller, more uncertain, and more complex but also dangerously exciting. As Sarajevo burns, the boy becomes a teenager. He wanders the ruined streets, collecting things left behind by the dead and those who fled, trading them for food. Through the detours and pathways of growing up, alongside friends – caught between the Blue Helmets and Radio Sarajevo – Tijan learns to survive. But at what cost? Tijan Sila’s story speaks of the unexpected; of how poets become killers, and killers become heroes; of people who are suddenly stripped of all humanity. And of the shards war leaves forever in the minds of the survivors.
Location : Festival Garden
Geopoetika, Serbia, 2026
The Road to Last Call / Put za fajront
Nebojša Bročić
A saga of a generation that, in the twilight of a country – post-Tito Yugoslavia in the 1980s – fought through bold life choices and family battles for the right to grow up without becoming the very thing it was fighting against. Witty and deeply moving, The Road to Last Call is the story of a young theatre director who, in search of identity and an authentic space of freedom within a conservative environment, makes a radical decision: with the help of his sister and friends from his theatre troupe, he transforms his grandfather's old family home, a former butcher's shop, into an illegal nightclub, making it both the means and the setting for an uncompromising struggle for the right to personal choice.
Location : Festival Garden
Kreativni centar, Serbia, 2025
This is not a Romance Novel
/ Ovo nije ljubavni roman
Aleksandra Jovanović
Ljubica lives in a small town, attends her first year of high school, and loves watching romantic movies. She constantly imagines possible love scenarios in her own life, even though in reality she hasn’t experienced her first kiss yet. She often complains about this to her best friends, Siniša and Iva. One spring day she makes a decision: by the end of the year, the three of them will all be in relationships! However, reality is far from the patterns seen in romantic films, and Ljubica soon realizes that her dreams will not come true so easily.
Location : Festival Garden