Belgrade Film Festival after the closing: a starry guest list, an empty city
The three-decade festival that in February brought Angelina Jolie, Jodie Foster and Benedict Cumberbatch to the Sava Centre has left behind a programme success and an open question about what the audience takes from it.
On Friday evening, 31 January, when Angelina Jolie stepped out of a black van in front of the Sava Centre wearing a long graphite-grey dress and her hair down, the snow falling on New Belgrade had covered the red carpet to the point where some of the photographers had trouble framing a shot without a white veil on their lenses. An eight-second applause, the snow that did not stop, and the moment in which the actress paused at the entrance to the Belgrade Hall and turned to the crowd with that familiar diplomatic wave, set the tone for the opening of a Belgrade Film Festival that over the next eight days, until 6 February, would draw audiences through the Sava Centre from early morning past midnight.
The festival, which this year marked the first decade of its existence in its current form after the 2016 relaunch, opened with the screening of Sons of Adam by Angelos Manolopoulos, in which Jolie plays a mother who, in the late stage of her life, tries to reconcile her two adult sons; the film was shot in Aegean Thrace on a budget of forty million dollars. Alongside Jolie, the Cannes-flavoured strand of the programme featured Jodie Foster with Quiet Liberties and Benedict Cumberbatch with The Quantum Garden, while Jessica Chastain came to Belgrade to accompany the screening of her directorial debut Everything That Is Left.
The festival’s programme director Nemanja Becker, who took over from Mirjana Bobic Mojsilovic in 2024, said at the closing press conference that this edition had taken sixty-five thousand viewers through the Sava Centre, four thousand more than the previous season. The programme consisted of forty-eight films divided into Main Programme, World Cinema Panorama, Hommage, Film Salon and Small Screen sections, with the strongest demand for the Main Programme, where tickets for all performances were sold out six days before the festival.
What the festival means once it ends
What this kind of festival offers the host city is clear: once a year, for eight days, Belgrade is placed on the international cultural calendar, the red-carpet photos circulate from Paris to Tokyo via the agency wires, and central hotels record an occupancy figure that, compared with late January, is statistically visible. What the festival does not give the city is equally clear: after 6 February, the Sava Centre returns to its calendar of concerts and conventions, the films shown in Belgrade return to international distribution where they have already been seen, and domestic audiences are left with a memory referred back to until next year.
What remains as a lasting value is the festival’s educational programme, in which Jolie, Foster and Cumberbatch held masterclasses at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts for an audience of three hundred students per session. Those sessions, according to FDU’s vice-rector for teaching Branka Bacic, received unusual treatment in being filmed and made available to FDU students over the next five years as part of the archive. Foster, in her two-hour masterclass, shared experience from the production of Quiet Liberties, emphasising the importance of the authorial relationship between director and actor in a contemporary Hollywood context where production houses increasingly cut into the director’s autonomy.
As for the selection, Becker openly admitted in his closing statement that the festival’s commercial model, which depends on production houses arranging star tours from Berlin through Belgrade to Thessaloniki, is becoming less reliable. Hollywood studios in 2026 have reduced their actors’ festival appearances by thirty per cent compared with 2019, meaning that the Belgrade Film Festival, which is not an A-list event with calendar priority, must carefully fit its dates around schedules controlled by others. This is the reason Pedro Almodovar dropped out of this edition’s programme after being announced through to December 2025; he withdrew at the last moment due to changes in the production of his new film.
The 2026 Belgrade Film Festival therefore presents a dual balance: a programmatic success but a structural vulnerability. The festival curators are already thinking about the next season; the dates, according to an informal statement from Becker to journalists, are fixed for the period from 29 January to 5 February 2027. Negotiations with production houses for next year’s stars are under way, but concrete names, as is customary, will not be publicly announced before autumn.
