Golden Seal of Film Archive Goes to Director Boro Draskovic

There is something almost theatrically neat about an institution that guards a nation’s cinematic memory marking its own birthday by handing the gift to someone else. On June 2, the Yugoslav Film Archive announced that this year’s Golden Seal, its most important honour, goes to director and screenwriter Boro Draskovic, on the very day the Archive itself turns seventy-seven.

The Golden Seal is not an award handed out lightly. It is reserved for a body of work, for authors whose vision has hardened into something that can fairly be called an opus. Draskovic, whose career spans decades, enters that narrow circle not as a surprise but as confirmation of what audiences long understood: this is a directorial signature you recognise on sight.

Why now, and why Draskovic?

The timing is no accident. The honour is presented on June 6, the Archive’s birthday, which turns the ceremony into a quiet ritual of continuity: the institution celebrates itself by celebrating an author. The choice was independently proposed by director Darko Bajic and acting director Aleksandar Erdeljanovic, two men who view the same cinematic canon from different angles, one from the craft, the other from the institution.

That double authorship of the proposal is worth noting. When a working director and the keeper of the archive agree on a single name, the recognition arrives from both practice and memory. Draskovic’s body of work, then, is honoured not only by the profession that makes films but by the one that saves them from oblivion.

The Golden Seal is the most important recognition of the Yugoslav Film Archive and stands as a tribute to decades of creative work, the institution said in its statement announcing the award to Boro Draskovic.

What follows the ceremony?

The award does not stand alone. That same June 6 also opens the 28th Nitrate Film Festival, an event devoted to the very physical, flammable, fragile material that film was once made from. The festival runs through June 15 and presents a selection of 58 works from 23 national cinemas.

The pairing reads almost like a programme. On one side a living author and his work are honoured; on the other, the raw stuff of cinema is screened, nitrate stock kept under special conditions because it carries both beauty and danger. The Nitrate Film Festival is a globally rare format, since few archives anywhere can even meet the conditions to project such material.

What the Archive is saying with this gesture is simple: film heritage is not a museum piece under glass but a living thing still watched, projected and rewarded. Draskovic’s Golden Seal and the nitrate screenings are two sides of the same story about who remembers, and how.

Will a festival programme of fifty-eight titles from twenty-three countries bring audiences back into the Archive’s hall, or has nitrate film remained a fascination for a narrow circle of devotees?