The Last Balkan Cowboy is a long-term project by photographer and filmmaker Dragana Jurišić that retraces the footsteps of cult Yugoslav filmmaker Hari Džekson, whose Western-inspired films transformed the landscapes around Bijeljina, in present-day Bosnia-Herzegovina, into imagined frontiers. Casting local people and drawing on Wild West archetypes, Džekson created cinematic worlds that briefly united communities later divided by the Yugoslav Wars.
A photographic exhibition currently showing at Dublin's Temple Bar Galleries + Studios precedes a feature-length documentary on Džekson, directed by Jurišić, scheduled to premiere in late 2026 - view a gallery of images from the exhibition above.
The photographs were made during three research and filming trips across Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia between 2024 and 2025.
Following rumours and local folklore, Jurišić traced Džekson's life and disappearance alongside the fragmentation of the Balkan states.
Working in the tradition of production stills, her images focus not on action but on pauses: actors between takes, landscapes suspended in time, and the quiet aftermath of a fractured nation.
Presented as a cinematic panorama referencing the Western horizon line, the exhibition offers a disjointed, incomplete storyboard that resists fixed narratives of place or history.
Jurišić's personal history is deeply entwined with Džekson's legacy. Her father was a close friend of the filmmaker and learned photography under his guidance.
In 1991, during the early months of the Yugoslav Wars, Jurišić’s family home was destroyed, along with thousands of her father’s photographic prints and negatives.
From that loss emerged her own photographic practice, rooted in memory, displacement, and the search for identity after conflict.
Like Džekson, Jurišić is drawn to the Western outlaw figure: a wandering outsider shaped by migration, placelessness, and moral resolve.
At a time marked by renewed conflict, nationalism, and struggles over land, her photographs propose alternative narratives of belonging and resilience.
Echoing Džekson’s words painted on a Bijeljina cinema—"Let your dream be your weapon"—Jurišić revives his mythology as a fundamentally liberatory vision, walking the line between a lost country and the possibility of cultural kinship beyond borders.
The Last Balkan Cowboy is at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios until 01 March 2025 - find out more here
