Terveisiä Serbiasta. Don Edkins 12.11.08
The Free Zone Film Festival in Belgrade, Serbia - freezonebelgrade.org - is young, fresh and noisy.
Just four years old, this year (7 to 12 November) it had a new team. Srdjan Keca, the programme director is 28 years old, with his equally young colleagues Bojana Cućilović (festival coordinator), Jeja Veljković (guest team organisor) and Dragana Jovanović (press liason).
It’s a small festival, one screen, 17 films – but each screening in the 375 people cinema was packed out, often with a rerun having to be scheduled later in the night.
Serbia has its problems. A small country split up from its neighbours during the Yugoslav meltdown and saddled with the legacy of Milošević and his partners-in-crime. The bombed out offices of the Information Ministry and other government buildings remain broken, blackened shells – as if the country is not ready to move forward. There is a sense of existential priorities.
But the audiences are passionate, vocal and pumped up. After-screening discussions of Taxi To the Dark Side brought long monologue testimonials from a survivor of early torture of political prisoners, and the need for a South African-type truth and reconciliation commission to investigate past atrocities from a more contemporary survivor – much to the dismay of the majority of the audience that stayed but who didn’t get a chance to have a say before the following film.
Please Vote For Me, with a longer hour and a half discussion time allocation, and almost full audience participation, showed up the divide from the past to the future. “Propaganda!” intoned a blue-suited man with a long read-out statement of something to do with imperialism and the failures of democracy since the time of Aristotle. The rest of the audience was visibly and vocally upset, and ready to join in discussions about human rights, democracy and films.
“I want to show films that tell good stories and provoke people in Serbia to be able to look out of the box they think they are in”, says Srdjan. “But”, he muses, “how can we make this festival more radical, less conventional?”
The festival has a great team. Lets see what they put together for next year.
