Serbian Women First Time in Official Cannes Program

On the list of ten short films competing for the main competition award at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, among names from France, Japan and Brazil, sat a single Serbian sentence that reads at once like a confession and a defense. Tamara Todorovic, with her fifteen-minute film “Nobody Said Anything”, became the first Serbian woman director in the festival’s main short film competition, chosen from 3,184 entries that arrived from 136 countries.

The second half of this double event belongs to Tara Gajovic, whose graduation film “Across the Threshold” was included in the La Cinef student program, where it passed through a filter of roughly 2,750 submissions down to just 19 selected titles. In the span of a few days at the same festival, held from May 12 to May 23, the two young authors pushed a line that had stood still for decades.

Why does this matter more than a single festival paragraph?

To grasp the weight of this result, one date is enough: 1987. That was the last time a domestic short reached the Cannes main competition, with Milos Radovic. Everything that happened on the Croisette in between meant the periphery for Serbian cinema, side programs, parallel sections. Entry into the main short film selection is not a nostalgic footnote but the breaking of a long silence.

“Nobody Said Anything” is a co-production of Serbia, France, Slovenia and Croatia, with the Naked production house and Crna Vucinic behind the project and Stefan Arsenijevic as mentor. It premiered on May 22. “Across the Threshold” was made at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, mentored by Srdan Golubovic. Two films, two schools, two entrances to the same festival, yet behind both stands the same production climate.

Films that were made in spite of

Speaking to “Danas”, both authors refused to separate their success from the context in which it was made. That is a rare gesture in an industry used to thank-you notes and diplomatic phrasing.

It is a great success to have a film at Cannes, it was made under circumstances of terrible regime pressure on universities.

That is how Tara Gajovic describes the conditions under which she worked on her graduation film. Tamara Todorovic stated her position just as plainly, tying her personal triumph to a wider movement.

I am proud of going to Cannes, just as I am proud of the students who initiated important changes.

Statements like these change the way the selection reads. The festival closed on May 23, the Palme d’Or for best film went to “Fjord” by Cristian Mungiu, while the best short film award went to Federico Luis. La Cinef crowned “Laser-Cat”. In that ranking of winners, the two Serbian names did not take home the main trophies, but they won something harder to measure: a place on a list from which no one can erase them.

What remains open is the question of what the system does with authors who made it in spite of it, not thanks to it. Will these two careers be built in a country that indirectly pushed them toward Cannes, or somewhere else?

Whom do you trust more, the festival jury or the sentence of an author who says her film was made in spite of, not thanks to?