Copy of A Writer Arrives in Sarajevo, but Finds Herself: Kuba Dorabialski’s Agata the Writer
83RD VENICE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2026 REVIEW:
Directed by: Kuba Dorabialski | 2026 | Australia | 95 min
-Shahran Morshed
There is a particular kind of uncertainty that accompanies every act of storytelling; the uneasy space between curiosity and intrusion, between remembering and possessing, between giving a voice and speaking on behalf of someone else. Kuba Dorabialski's Agata the Writer begins from this fragile territory. On the surface, it is a film about a writer searching for a story. But beneath that premise lies a much more profound question: what happens when the story we want to tell is not truly ours?
Agata played by Mia Wasikowska, a Polish-Australian writer, arrives in Sarajevo with a clear purpose. She wants to write a novel about the Bosnian War. She comes not as a survivor, not as a witness, but as an artist searching for fragments, memories, conversations, images, and emotions that might become the foundation of her book. Sarajevo, however, refuses to become simply a landscape of inspiration. The city that she imagined as a source of historical material slowly transforms into a place of confrontation, forcing her to question not only the story she is writing but also the reason behind her desire to write it.
Dorabialski's remarkable achievement is that he never reduces Agata into an insensitive outsider. The film does not offer an easy moral judgment. Instead, it enters the much more complicated territory of artistic responsibility. Agata's intention comes from a genuine desire to understand, yet the film constantly asks whether understanding another person's trauma is ever completely possible. Can empathy cross the distance between experience and imagination? Or does every attempt to recreate another person's suffering inevitably carry a trace of appropriation?
The title Agata the Writer gradually reveals its subtle irony. At the beginning, Agata's identity seems inseparable from her profession. She is a writer first, and everything else comes after. She arrives in Sarajevo believing that writing is an act of discovery and that through research and observation, she can approach a history that belongs to others. But as the film progresses, her confidence begins to dissolve. The writer who came searching for a story slowly becomes the subject of her own investigation.
This transformation gives the film its emotional centre. Agata the Writer is not ultimately about a woman writing about war; it is about a woman discovering the limits of her own perspective.
Dorabialski avoids the familiar language of war cinema. There are no attempts to recreate historical trauma through spectacle, no images designed to force emotional responses. Instead, he focuses on the quieter aftermath of history, the spaces where memory continues to exist, not through grand monuments or official narratives, but through ordinary people, conversations, silences, and unresolved feelings.
Sarajevo itself becomes more than a setting. It becomes a living presence in the film. It shows how a city carrying layers of memory, pain, humour, and contradiction. It refuses to be simplified. Through Agata's encounters with local people, Dorabialski explores the distance between those who experience history and those who later attempt to interpret it.
Adding another layer of ambiguity is the strange mystery surrounding a series of provocative artworks that disappear throughout the city. This surreal element pushes the film beyond a conventional drama and brings it closer to the territory of an essay film. Reality and fiction begin to merge, reflecting the very process of writing itself, the way memory, imagination, and interpretation constantly reshape one another.
The disappearance of these artworks also mirrors Agata's own artistic crisis. She arrives believing that stories can be collected, organised, and transformed into literature. But gradually she discovers that stories resist ownership. They belong to the people who carry them, to the experiences that created them, and to the silences that surround them.
Mia Wasikowska gives one of her most delicate performances as Agata. She portrays a woman whose internal transformation happens almost entirely through hesitation and silence. There is no dramatic moment of revelation; instead, we watch someone slowly lose the certainty that once guided her. Wasikowska captures the discomfort of a person forced to confront an uncomfortable truth: that good intentions do not always erase the consequences of one's actions.
Dorabialski's background between cinema, literature, and video art is deeply felt in the film's form. The making of the film is truly very fascinating. And the last thirty minutes of the film is completely unforgettable. It gives us a very unique dimention of filmmaking.
Agata the Writer belongs to a long tradition of self-reflective cinema; works that examine not only the world they represent but also the process of representation itself. And what makes the film deeply moving is that Agata's journey is more like a journey within. It reminds us the role of the writer. It's not always to speak louder, but sometimes to listen more carefully, to keep discovering oneself beautifully.
A writer arrives in Sarajevo searching for a story. But what she finds is something far more difficult. The limits of her own imagination, the weight of another person's memory, and the responsibility that comes with the act of telling.
And perhaps that is where true storytelling begins. Not with certainty, but with the courage to search for the unknown.
Shahran Morshed / Poet, Filmmaker & Critic
Founder and director of F for Films
Founder and chief-editor of Basically Cinema
Contact : shahran.sp@gmail.com
F for Films : filmsffor@gmail.com
Basically Cinema : basicallycinema@gmail.com
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