Majnuni (Bosnia and Herzegovina) by Kouros Alaghband Joins the Auteur Cinema Archive 'A dreamlike odyssey through longing, identity, and the beauty of getting lost.'

The Auteur Cinema Archive proudly welcomes Majnuni (2019), the debut feature by Kouros Alaghband, an Iranian-American filmmaker whose haunting visual style was forged under the mentorship of Béla Tarr at his Sarajevo-based film school, Film.Factory. The film—winner of Best Narrative Feature Film at the Brussels Independent Film Festival and an official selection at Slamdance 2020—is a hypnotic descent into obsession and fractured identity, set against the backdrop of a war-scarred Sarajevo that feels both ghostly and eternal.

In Majnuni (a title that translates to a state of longing so consuming it drives the lover insane), we follow Adnan, a modern-day Majnun who spends his nights shadowing a broken family through the sleeping streets of Sarajevo. As the night deepens, his identity begins to blur into theirs—his memories, fantasies, and desires fusing with theirs in a fever dream of loss and yearning. Long takes, glacial pacing, and haunting use of sound and color create a oneiric rhythm that recalls the work of Tarr himself, while pushing beyond into something uniquely Alaghband’s: a meditation on how obsession and place become indistinguishable.

Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum described Majnuni as “dreamlike and haunting… periodically reminding me of Holy Motors by Leos Carax—intriguing, provocative, and beautiful as well as puzzling.” Slamdance programmer Paul Sbrizzipraised its “languorous, elegant, fluid shooting style” and “exquisite sense of color and composition”, calling it “richly rewarding to those willing to come along for the ride.”

Curator Kris De Meester on the film’s inclusion:

“There’s a line from Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground that says, ‘The pleasure lies not in the discovery of truth, but in the search for it.’ That, to me, is what Majnuni embodies—the beauty of getting lost. Alaghband’s film isn’t about arriving anywhere; it’s about wandering through emotional and spiritual terrains until the line between the seeker and the sought disappears. It’s a cinema of drift, of intoxicated movement, of surrender.”

Alaghband’s process itself mirrors this philosophy of surrender. Rejecting scripted precision, he built Majnunicollaboratively with his lead actor Adnan Omerovic, asking him not to perform a character but to simply “be himself.” The result is a film where reality and fiction dissolve into each other—where the filmmaker, his cast, and his environment all seem to merge into one elusive consciousness.

Shot in just 17 days with a micro-budget and a small team, Majnuni feels monumental in its intimacy. Its slow rhythms and hypnotic atmosphere align with the tradition of slow cinema, yet its emotional pulse—its restless, feverish searching—makes it timelessly human.

By including Majnuni in the Auteur Cinema Archive, curator Kris De Meester honors a work that doesn’t just tell a story but enacts a state of being—cinema as pilgrimage, where losing one’s way becomes the point of arrival.

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