Sterijino Pozorje runs without its international strand
The 71st Novi Sad festival opened without its Krugovi international selection and film programme after the provincial government declined to fund them.
- The 71st Sterijino Pozorje runs in Novi Sad from May 26 to June 3, under the motto Our Stories, Memories and Suffering.
- The competition holds eight productions, six from Serbia and one each from Maribor and Banja Luka.
- The Krugovi international selection and the film programme were dropped because the provincial government did not fund them.
- The Sterija Awards will be handed out on June 3 on the Jovan Djordjevic stage of the Serbian National Theatre.
For decades this festival measured itself by how much of the world it could bring to Novi Sad. This year it is measured by what is missing. The 71st Sterijino Pozorje, running from May 26 to June 3 under the motto Our Stories, Memories and Suffering, opens for the first time in recent memory without its Krugovi international selection and without its film programme, because the provincial government simply did not fund those strands.
The opening night on May 26, the production Gospa Nola based on the writing of Isidora Sekulic, set the tone the motto openly invites: story, memory, suffering. The choice was no accident. Sekulic is precisely the voice in Serbian literature that turns inner life into dramatic material rather than sentiment.
What exactly is missing from this year’s programme?
Krugovi was for years the festival’s window onto the region and Europe, the place where the home scene measured itself against work made elsewhere. Without that strand, Pozorje shrinks back to what it once began as: a contest of domestic stagecraft. The film programme has vanished too, a segment that had offered audiences a different rhythm between theatre evenings.
The decision not to fund those parts was budgetary rather than artistic, and that is exactly why it stings more. A selection can be defended on taste, but the absence of funding is an institutional move that narrows the festival’s horizon without a single word about aesthetics.
Eight productions in the running for the Sterija Award
What remains is not small. The competition was assembled by selector Svetislav Bule Goncic and holds eight productions, six from Serbia and one each from Maribor and Banja Luka. Those two guest productions, from Slovenia and Republika Srpska, are the only surviving trace of the regional dialogue that Krugovi once carried as a trademark.
The Sterija Awards will be presented on June 3 on the Jovan Djordjevic stage of the Serbian National Theatre, where each edition is formally closed. The festival will, as always, name its best, yet one question hangs over the whole diminished ceremony.
Can a festival remain itself once the part through which it looked at the world is taken away?
