To Hold a Mountain

To Hold a Mountain, a documentary by Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazić, premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the World Cinema Documentary Grand Jury Prize; it holds a 93% score on Rotten Tomatoes. It is a co-production drawing on Serbia, France, Montenegro, Slovenia and Croatia, and it belongs to the patient, observational tradition of direct cinema.

It settles into the daily rhythm of a mother and daughter living high in the Montenegrin mountains, who are resisting a plan to turn their ancestral land into a NATO military training ground. Tutorov and Glomazić watch them tend their livestock, make artisanal cheese and look after each other, and they let the political stakes rise out of the texture of ordinary work, with no voice-over commentary and little open confrontation. The pace is unhurried, the attention never slackens, and the two women do not budge.

The Sundance jury called it "the truest example of the power of cinema to make the personal political," and the citation describes the method well: the film earns its argument about land, sovereignty and resistance by first making us care about two women and the life they lead. It is among the most praised European documentaries of the year, and it marks Tutorov and Glomazić as formidable observers of the region's overlooked corners.