Mirjana Karanović on the World Premiere of ‘Mother Mara’ and Her Roles as Director, Actor and Woman

On the eve of the world premiere of “Mother Mara,” her second feature as a director, multi-hyphenate Mirjana Karanović, the Balkan region’s most famous star, visited the Variety Lounge presented by the Sarajevo Film Festival and BH Telecom.

Just as with her first feature, “The Good Wife,” Karanović stars and takes co-writing credits in “Mother Mara.” She discusses how her roles as director, actor and woman sometimes came in conflict on her second feature, while her first was very easy.

Karanović notes that “Mother Mara”, about a grieving woman, who rediscovers her life force through a relationship with a friend of her late son, shows a successful woman defying convention, doing something that might be considered inappropriate for her age.

Although she defines herself primarily as an actress, she says, “Directing and making movies give me so much pleasure. It’s so exciting. So, I always say theater is a marriage for me. And movies are adventures.”

Karanović reveals plans for her third feature, to shoot next year, that will be a forbidden love story between two women.

Strong, unconventional women are very much Karanović’s stock in trade. When she played  leading roles in “Grbavica” by Bosnian Jasmila Zbanic and “The Fraulein” by Croatian Andrea Staka, who both wrote the parts for her, it made her think about directing herself. She notes, “I learned primarily that gentle women can be strong enough to be a leader of the film crew and to command everybody, I mean not command like in military, but to tell everybody what to do and to be a main person in this process. It was before that in my mind, it was reserved for the men.”