Serbian Sci-Fi Thriller ‘Sanctuary’ Lands U.S. Distribution With Vertical

Serbian post-apocalyptic thriller Sanctuary has found a U.S. home, with Vertical acquiring domestic distribution rights to director Filip Kovačević’s English-language science-fiction feature, according to Variety.

The film stars Nina Kiri, known for The Handmaid’s Tale, alongside Dutch actor Jonas Smulders and Serbian actor Darko Perić, whose credits include Netflix’s Money Heist.

Set on a post-apocalyptic Earth, Sanctuary begins with the discovery of a woman preserved in cryogenic suspension. Her arrival creates fear within a village struggling to survive in the remnants of civilization, eventually sending a young warrior and the mysterious woman on a journey in search of a lost city.

Their quest could provide answers about the past and potentially offer humanity a path toward restoration.

Kovačević, who previously directed the 2016 action thriller Incarnation, described the film as an attempt to approach dystopian science fiction from a different point in civilization’s collapse. Rather than taking place immediately after the end of the world or thousands of years later, Sanctuary occupies what the filmmaker calls a “semi-far future.”

“The time is near enough so the events that led to the collapse of civilization are still relevant, but far enough that they have been shrouded in mystery and myth,” Kovačević told Variety.

That distance allows the film to examine how knowledge of the old world can transform into legend as generations pass. Kovačević said the story also explores the cyclical nature of history and the role individuals play within those recurring patterns while remaining grounded in genre entertainment.

Sanctuary is produced by Đorđe Stanković, Kovačević and Vukota Antunović for Belgrade-based Void Pictures and TS Media, the production arm of Telekom Srbija. Sublimity is handling worldwide sales and has secured additional international distribution deals for the film.

For its Serbian producers, the project represents an effort to make a large-scale science-fiction film capable of reaching audiences beyond the country’s domestic market without abandoning its production identity.

“We set out to make an ambitious science-fiction film from Serbia that could speak to an international audience without losing its own identity,” Stanković told Variety, describing the production as a significant undertaking for the filmmaking team.

Antunović similarly pointed to the combination of an international and domestic cast with a Serbian production crew as central to the project’s development.

The film also represents a larger international push for Telekom Srbija’s TS Media. In a statement provided to Variety, the company described Sanctuary as a shift in the scale and ambition of Serbian production and part of a strategy to establish the country as a source of original intellectual property and internationally marketable projects rather than solely a filming destination.

With an English-language screenplay, international cast, worldwide sales representation and a U.S. distributor now attached, Sanctuary becomes one of the more ambitious recent attempts to bring Serbian genre filmmaking into the broader international marketplace.

Sublimity co-founder Alfredo Lara Orbezo said the company has secured several key international partners for the film and pointed to its world-building and production scale as elements expected to help it reach global genre audiences.

Vertical’s acquisition gives Sanctuary a path to U.S. audiences as its producers and Sublimity continue the film’s international rollout. A domestic release date has not yet been announced.