A WORD FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Taking on the demanding, yet also exciting task of bringing FEST back to Belgrade audiences after two and a half years, I was aware that many obstacles — often exhausting and stressful — awaited me along the way. Before you, at last, is the 53rd edition of your favorite film festival, offering as many as 115 films from 54 national cinemas from every corner of the world, from Canada to New Zealand, from Argentina to Japan, from Sweden to South Africa, with a few special emphases, above all on European, regional, and Anglo-American films.
The heightened presence of American and British cinema is due, among other things, to FEST’s return, after six and a half years, to Sava Centar, whose audience — beyond quality art-house film — nonetheless also expects some more traditional forms of cinematic aesthetics and narrative.
Hence, the Gala Program includes several major domestic films that will certainly connect well with the enormous audience of the great Blue Hall, and I am especially pleased that FEST will screen the comeback films of the doyens of Serbian and Yugoslav cinema, Lordan Zafranović and Slobodan Šijan — works that, in quality, bring us back to their creative peaks of the first half of the 1980s, whose themes likewise serve as a reminder of the 20th century, though its first half. And it was precisely these films, along with a couple more titles from the Gala Program, that gave me the idea for one of the festival’s new selections, titled “Farewell, 20th Century” — since it became apparent that a considerable number of filmmakers are reaching for people and events that defined this period of world history, still very much present in the memory of many. Whether dealing with dark historical phenomena (the Holocaust, clerical pedophilia, the Heysel Stadium disaster) or the biographies of those who pushed humanity forward through the 20th century (Milica Tomić, Constantin Brâncuși, Sergiu Celibidache, Bill Evans, David Lean, Umm Kulthum), all these films bear witness to a dynamic century that irreversibly accelerated history (or its end), with consequences still visible today.
If I were to try to sum up the concept of this year’s festival in a single sentence, I would say that FEST 2026 is a combination of tradition and innovation.
Three competition selections certainly count among the innovations. The largest — though only first among equals — is the competitive selection of European film, more precisely, films from European Union countries. The competitive selection of world cinema equally represents all other continents, namely Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and it is here that some of what I consider the finest films of the festival can be found. Finally, the regional selection, alongside the aforementioned Serbian films, brings exceptionally strong titles from Croatia, North Macedonia, Romania, Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus.
The near-total absence of American studio film will be offset by a program of the most significant independent American films, bounded by the festivals that have for decades carried the fame of “US indie” film around the world — Sundance and Tribeca — fittingly named after the most famous characters of their founders: “Travis Bickle and the Sundance Kid.”
British cinema has shown exceptional vitality and creativity this year, forming the backbone of the “Game of Thrones” program, alongside several more films from countries of the former Commonwealth.
The central nostalgia program draws on FEST’s once extremely popular and esteemed segment “Vidici” (“Horizons”), conceived and successfully hosted in the first half of the 1970s by the celebrated Dušan Makavejev. In this selection, called “TBC (Trash, Bizarre, Cult) in the Small Hours,” audiences will be able to see new premiere films that push the boundaries of taste and of what is acceptable, regardless of genre, as well as premiere works from the 1970s that could have — but didn’t — find a place on the original “Vidici.”
Finally, two more programs belong to this nostalgia, modest in number of titles but no less significant for FEST’s past and future alike. “FEST Pantheon” brings the newest films by filmmakers who have long been present both at FEST and on the world film scene, while the “Children’s Parade” selection reaffirms a program present at FEST since its very beginning, through which the youngest audience — many for the first time — will feel a piece of the festival atmosphere in and in front of Sava Centar’s Blue Hall.
Finally, if a loyal FEST visitor, having watched a good part of this year’s offering, were to find some common denominator or central thread running through most of the filmmakers’ concerns, it would certainly be the sum of the following themes, which are interlinked and often dependent on one another: intra-family relationships as a manifestation of ever-more-present dysfunction; work and adaptation to new environments as a consequence of increasingly frequent migration; the affirmation of difference and nonconformism, whether through gender or racial identity, sexual or ideological orientation; re-examining the past in order to understand the present and sense the future; the often unsuccessful attempts of the small individual to resist the machine called globalization…
In the end, I will not offer my own recommendations, though I admit it is not easy to make one’s way through a labyrinth of over a hundred films, across ten halls and ten program sections.
You will not go wrong if you choose whatever intuitively appeals to you most, though I would draw attention to just one fact that I find especially important. Fewer than a quarter of the films at this year’s FEST will later appear in regular cinema distribution — which says enough both about their exclusivity and about the refreshed concept of this autumn festival.
For the first time in an October time slot, but I hope, for the 53rd time in the hearts of all lovers of the seventh art…
