Black Bear announced today that its management arm has signed award-winning, Bosnian-Dutch writer and director Ena Sendijarević, whose sophomore feature Sweet Dreams was selected as the official Dutch submission for this year’s Academy Awards© and deemed a “startlingly accomplished sophomore film” by Variety. The trade publication also named Sendijarević one of Variety’s “10 Directors to Watch for 2024.

Sendijarević’s feature debut, Take Me Somewhere Nice, an idiosyncratic and absurdist European road trip movie, won the Special Jury award at the 48th International Film Festival in Rotterdam, as well as the “Heart of Sarajevo” award at the 25th Sarajevo Film Festival. The film was then selected for the 72th Cannes Film Festival Acid selection. Sendijarević has also made several short films, of which the latest, “Import,” had its world premiere in Cannes’ Director’s Fortnight section, and was the official Dutch entry for Live Action Short Film at the 89th Academy Awards©.

Next for Sendijarević is The Possessed, which is set to launch sales at Rotterdam’s upcoming CineMart. The film follows an eccentric female director on an isolated island who “shoots a film about the effects of the witch hunt on the modern female psyche…but nothing goes as planned.”