Film Festivals in August

The Sarajevo Film Festival was born in 1995, at the end of the four-year siege, as an act of civic defiance: people crossed sniper lines to watch films, and the festival Obala Art Centar built from that beginning is now the premier film event of the region. Every mid-August, ten-plus venues across the city fill for eight days, the open-air screenings pack the Metalac arena, and the Heart of Sarajevo awards anchor the regional industry the festival effectively rebuilt. It remains cheap to attend by festival standards, walkable end to end, and set in a city where the coffee ritual between screenings is half the program.

Locarno is the connoisseur's A-list festival. Running since 1946, it sits a tier below Cannes and Venice in red-carpet wattage and a tier above them in access: screenings are open to the public, the auteur-driven competition consistently launches careers, and the nightly Piazza Grande screenings put 8,000 people under the stars in front of one of Europe's largest screens. The setting is the multiplier, Mediterranean Switzerland on Lake Maggiore, where you swim in the lake in the afternoon and watch a premiere in the piazza at night. For travelers who love cinema rather than celebrity, this is the festival to actually attend.

Venice Film Festival (Mostra) is the world's oldest, held on the Lido island, which physically separates the festival from the city proper and gives it an unusually self-contained atmosphere. The combination of Venice's canals and the festival's late August/early September timing makes this arguably the most beautiful film festival setting in the world. The Lido transforms into a film-focused village where encounters with filmmakers and critics are unusually relaxed. Public screenings are available in Venice proper for those without Lido accreditation.