My question is similar to this one: LibreOffice Writer presents filename with garbled characters , but more specific. I wasn’t sure whether to ask a new question or post a comment.
The behaviour of LibreOffice in a UTF-8 environment seems to be broken. 
To wit:
When opening any file with any multibyte characters in the name LibreOffice tells me that the file does not exist. To be more specific:
- Using the Open File dialogue box, all UTF-8 encoded file and directory names are garbled. For example, “Elŝutujo” appears as “ElÅutujo”
- Using the Open File dialogue box, attempting to descend such a garbled directory or open such a file results in an error stating that the directory or directory does not exist
- Attempting to open a file externally (using the operating system’s file manager + file associations) results in the same “file or directory does not exist” error if the file has multi-byte characters in its name or is in a directory with multi-byte characters in its name.
Environment:
- LibreOffice 4.2.8.2
- Kubuntu (Ubuntu 14.04.3 + KDE 4.13.3)
- LANG=eo.UTF-8