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There are three white fortresses that neatly demarcate the divides so evocatively drawn in Igor Drljača’s “The White Fortress,” recently named Bosnia and Herzegovina’s submission for the 94th Oscars. There’s the grim, encircling tower block in which scrappy low-level hustler Faruk (Pavle Čemerkić) lives with his grandmother. There’s the modernist dream home perched on a hill that belongs to the wealthy, distant, politically corrupt parents of teenager Mona (Sumeja Dardagan). And there’s the famous late-medieval White Fortress, or Bijela Tabija, the national monument that overlooks Sarajevo, where Faruk and Mona spend a single night of their doomed romance in an embrace that inevitably dissolves in the cold light of morning.

The love-across-the-social-divide narrative is hardly new, but writer-director Drljača turns familiarity into an advantage. Along with a gently intense performance from pale-eyed rising Balkan star Čemerkić, it allows him to pay attention to...

China’s Huahua Media has signed on to remake two classic war films from the Balkans as part of a push to improve diplomatic ties between the Middle Kingdom and countries taking part in its “Belt and Road” global infrastructure project, Chinese reports said. The news follows Huahua’s return to the spotlight as an investor on the upcoming “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” franchise film, though the company was better-known in the past for a short-lived slate financing deal with Paramount in 2017.

The ambassadors to China from Serbia and from Bosnia and Herzegovina were present as Huahua inked a deal with the Sarajevo Film Center and a Serbian production company to remake two Serbo-Croatian-language films: 1969’s “The Bridge,” about the defense of a span against the Nazis in World War II, and 1972’s “Walter Defends Sarajevo,” helmed by the Bosnian director Hajrudin Krvavac.

“The remake is not only a...