Three directors at Cannes, two debut women in the official selection
Serbian cinema is represented at the 79th Cannes Film Festival by three shorts and one feature, with Tamara Todorovic and Tara Gajovic the first female directors from Serbia in the festival's official selections.
When the audience in the Bunuel hall at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes settles in around nine in the evening on 17 May for the screening of the ten-minute film Nobody Said Anything, its director Tamara Todorovic, a twenty-six-year-old student at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, becomes the first woman from Serbia whose work is shown in the festival’s official short-film competition. The statistics that took her work into that selection are short and merciless: out of three thousand one hundred and eighty-four submissions from one hundred and thirty-six countries, ten directors were chosen, and two of those ten are women.
The selection of the 79th Cannes Film Festival, which runs from 12 to 23 May, has brought Serbian cinema three appearances across three different sections. Alongside Todorovic in the official short competition, Tara Gajovic with her medium-length film Across the Threshold participates in the La Cinef programme, which brings together the best films from the world’s film schools, while Ivan Markovic with his feature Promised Spaces has its premiere in the ACID sidebar, an independent section that selects films through a democratic vote of several hundred French film-makers.
All three productions came together within institutional frameworks that often complain of underfunding. Nobody Said Anything is a student work from the Film Directing department at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, co-produced with the Film Centre of Serbia. Across the Threshold is also a student film, a co-production between the FDU and the Hungarian school MOME in Budapest. Promised Spaces, which runs one hundred and eighteen minutes and was shot by Markovic in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the Krajina region between 2023 and 2025, was made on a budget that, according to the Film Centre of Serbia, falls below seven hundred thousand euros, less than a third of the average European production standard for a film of that length.
What the three films say about the state of domestic cinema
Tamara Todorovic and Tara Gajovic, in entering the Cannes selections, do not just represent their own work, they also represent a generational shift that has been under way in recent years. The FDU today has more female than male students, the Cannes-bound class of director Ognjen Glavonic from 2015 already feels historic, and the professoriate led by Goran Markovic, Srdan Golubovic and Mila Turajlic increasingly turns to working with female authors. That is not an ideological observation but a demographic fact, and the Cannes data simply formalises it.
Markovic, an established signature in the independent scene for some fifteen years, leaves with Promised Spaces the essayistic mode that marked his earlier works The Slow Fluorescent Bed and Object. The new film is narrative, following two storylines: one a returnee from the diaspora arriving in Lika, the other a group of village young people who leave for Belgrade. The festival material distributed by the Film Centre describes the film as a “post-Yugoslav road movie”, but those who have seen the working cuts speak of something much closer to a documentary genre, with long static takes and a minimal musical score.
As for industry reactions, the critics covering the screening in the Bunuel hall emphasised that Todorovic’s film, though uneven in its second half, has in its opening scene an engraver’s precision unusual for a student production. Sight and Sound, in its Cannes diary, describes the director as “an authorial voice that already knows what it is doing”, while the French Cahiers du Cinema wrote of Across the Threshold that it is “a European student film that does not apologise for its format”. Promised Spaces, judging by reports from the ACID premiere, produced a polarised reaction, with part of the French audience leaving after the fiftieth minute and part applauding for eight minutes at the end.
Three films in three selections cannot be counted as a matter of quantity. What this Cannes cycle means for Serbian cinema can only be judged once domestic audiences encounter the works themselves. Promised Spaces is announced for a Serbian theatrical premiere in October as part of the FEST programme, and the Todorovic and Gajovic shorts will be shown at the FEST Short Film festival at the end of June. Until then, the Cannes screenings remain material that is talked about but that domestic audiences have had no chance to see, part of a problem that returns every year.
