BHFF JURY AWARDS

Since 2012, BHFF™ awarded BHFF™ Jury Awards to the most outstanding films screened at the BHFF™ and selected by jury members as most outstanding in its categories. Members of the BHFF™ Jury are accomplished and recognized members from the Bosnian and American cultural, film, and art communities who have significantly contributed to the Bosnian-Herzegovinian film industry and culture in general.

BHFF™ jury awards the following honors to the most outstanding films:

BHFF™ Jury Award for Best Documentary Film
BHFF™ Jury Award for Best Short Narrative Film
BHFF™ Jury Award for Best Feature Narrative Film

BHFF™ Jury Award for Best Acting Performance

JURY MEMBERS 2025

Bojan Bodružić

Bojan Bodružić was born in Sarajevo and has lived in Vancouver since 1994. He holds a Joint MFA in Creative Writing and Film Production from the University of British Columbia. His films have screened at various international film festivals, as well as MoMA. His documentary feature, The Museum of Forgotten Triumphs took the award for Best Canadian Documentary at the 2018 Vancouver International Film Festival and the award for Best Documentary at the 2019 Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival in NYC. After teaching filmmaking for many years, he now primarily devotes himself to writing and making films and is currently in post-production on a new dramatic feature.

Ida Sefer

Ida Sefer is from Bosanski Novi, BiH. Her family's experience with the genocide and war in BiH inspired her into community activism and leadership roles through various diaspora organizations: as President of the Board for the Bosnian American Genocide Institute and Education Center (BAGI); as the former Secretary of the Advisory Council for BiH (ACBH); and as a co-founder of the BiH Diasporic Conference (BiHDC). When she's not doing community organizing work, she spends her time enjoying Chicago's art community, through which she co-founded the Logan Square Immersive Arts Co-op, which evolved into the Space.01 gallery. Ida received her BA in Physics at North Central College, MA in Gender Studies and MSW from Loyola University Chicago.

Olivera Jokić

Olivera Jokić is a writer, educator, translator, and curator who spends most of her waking hours in New York City. She often thinks and writes about how and when works of art teach us to imagine who we are and what places we can imagine as our own. Long interested in how writing about the past and the future could build empires and dismantle entire nations, she recently and proudly translated Past: An Introduction to the Problem (kuda.org + Iskra Books 2024), a book about the work of filmmaker Želimir Žilnik as a body of knowledge about the real existing fantasy space that used to be former Yugoslavia.

Over the last 12 years, BHFF has introduced 33 jury members, representatives of Bosnian-Herzegovinian, American, and international film, arts, and literary communities, who have provided invaluable critical and curatorial reviews of works selected and presented at the BHFF.