At times Bosnia and Herzegovina has looked like it was stuck in a bit of a no-man’s land when it comes to film production, lacking the financial fire-power to press forward, but its TV series business is booming.

The Southeast European country boasts two Oscar nominations – Danis Tanović’s “No Man’s Land,” which nabbed a statuette in 2002, and Jasmila Žbanić’s “Quo Vadis, Aida?,” which was nominated in 2021 – and its filmmakers have enjoyed success on the festival circuit, but it still hasn’t upped its meagre level of production, especially in terms of fiction features, with only one or two majority Bosnian films produced a year.

The problem lies in the “messy and unregulated model of audiovisual support in general,” according to producer-director Jasmin Duraković, whose film “The Glory of Unhappiness” screens in the Bh Film sidebar at Sarajevo Film Festival, which presents the recent crop of films with investment from Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The long shadow of the war and its ravages continue to haunt a group of late middle-aged Sarajevan friends in the low-budget, tonally uneven dramedy “May Labor Day” from Bosnian multi-hyphenate Pjer Žalica. Although the material is both a little thin and a tad familiar, the script ticks off a range of contemporary social problems and issues such as the brain drain to Europe of the educated younger generation, junkie no-hopers who get clean through faith, the orphan kids kept off the street through charitable ventures and the nagging dissatisfaction felt by the ordinary men who fought for their country, but feel that it has lost its way.

Serving as the closing night attraction of this year’s Sarajevo Film Festival, “May Labor Day” is a co-production of all the territories of former Yugoslavia and features an ensemble of the region’s best-known actors, who appear to take great pleasure in performing together.

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New Sarajevo Film Festival director Jovan Marjanović is promising “a vintage edition” for the 28th Sff.

“We had a great opening film — Triangle of Sadness by Ruben Östlund — and we have a great closing film — May Labour Day by the Bosnian director Pjer Žalica, who’s one of the most beloved local filmmakers — so it’s going to be an emotional end to the festival,” says Marjanović who took over from Mirsad Purivatra, the festival’s original founder who started the festival in 1995 during the siege of Sarajevo in the Bosnian War.

Marjanović joined the Sff team in 1999, straight after high school, and started the top job after two years running the festival’s industry section and two years serving as Sff co-director alongside Purivatra. From the start, the Sff staked out its claim to be the premier festival for cinema from Southeastern Europe.