Three Serbian names on the Croisette: short films watched outside the programme

In the Bunuel hall, traditionally reserved for Cinefondation screenings, the 22 May evening session held one hundred and fifty viewers, among them roughly thirty professionals from world distribution. Across the Threshold, the twelve-minute fiction film by Tara Gajovic, produced at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, played second in a programme of four shorts from the student selection. When it ended, Gajovic received applause that lasted more than a minute, no small thing for a student work, given that the audience in that hall is known for its cool, careful evaluative culture. The Cinefondation has been the gateway for Andrei Zvyagintsev, Bahman Ghobadi, Corneliu Porumboiu and, not so long ago, Maja Milos.

Three Serbian names in this year’s Cannes selections are not merely a statistical occurrence. Tamara Todorovic with the short Nobody Said Anything competes in the official short-film competition, among ten selected titles worldwide. Tara Gajovic with Across the Threshold is in Cinefondation, the selection of eighteen student films from film schools around the world. Ivan Markovic with the documentary Promised Spaces takes part in ACID, the parallel sidebar led by the Association for the Diffusion of Independent Cinema, which over the past ten years has become a discovery space for directors such as Eduardo Williams and Adrian Sitaru. Three different selections, three different bodies that choose films in different ways, and all three this year with Serbian names.

What this means for the domestic scene

Considering that Serbia, with its film industry, has typically had one film a year in the Cannes selections over the past twenty years, most often as part of a regional or Balkan co-production, the presence of three directors at the same time is a signal worth registering carefully. This is a generation of directorial poetics that completed its formation over the past seven or eight years, primarily at the FDU, but also at ESEC in Paris (where Tamara Todorovic studied after Belgrade) and in Sarajevo (where Markovic was on a DOK.Inkubator residency). All three films are European co-productions with minority Serbian production participation, part of the European film ecosystem in which smaller national cinemas function as minority co-producers of larger projects.

Tara Gajovic’s Across the Threshold is the story of Marija, a seventeen-year-old girl from a town in northern Serbia who in one afternoon must decide whether to take her mother’s passport and cross the border, or stay. The film does not end with a clear choice, which in the traditional domestic medium-length production would have been seen as unfinished, but in the Cinefondation context that is precisely what qualifies it. Gajovic is a student of the class of 2022 in the studio of Professor Srdan Golubovic, the same crew that produced Maja Djurovic, whose Step by Step was at the Berlinale last year.

Tamara Todorovic’s Nobody Said Anything is formally a completely different film. Seven minutes, shot in a single take, the dialogue of two young women in a Belgrade cafe about what happened at a party last week. The theme is sexual violence that is not named explicitly, the dialogue runs around the words being avoided. The one-take form is a dramatic risk, but Todorovic, who before this film worked as Mila Turajlic’s assistant, has the craft discipline to carry it. Selection into the official short competition is, for a debut director, equivalent at Cannes to entering the main game, because from that programme every fifth title over the past decade has gone on to receive distribution in France, Germany and the Benelux.

Ivan Markovic with Promised Spaces is an already more experienced author, his previous documentary White Sea Silence was at Locarno in 2021. ACID is not a competitive section, but it is a space where films are watched for future distribution deals, which is clear from the figures, since half of this year’s ACID titles have already signed deals with French distributors after the festival. Promised Spaces deals with the theme of abandoned industrial facilities across Serbia, shot in Bor, Backa Topola, Knjazevac and Smederevska Palanka, with a narration moving between observational documentary and essay. The Film Centre of Serbia, which provided part of the funding for all three films, can take this as a threefold confirmation that the system works, but the question remains how much these successes translate into real domestic distribution once the films return home.