French Film Festival Opens June 23 in Belgrade

There is something quietly subversive about the idea that a film which weeks earlier opened the world’s most prestigious festival, under spotlights and black tie on the Croisette, will have its first local screening here for free, under the open sky, among the old trees of a botanical garden. That is exactly what happens on June 23, when the eighth edition of the French Film Festival opens in Belgrade with the title that launched this year’s 79th Cannes Film Festival.

The film is The Electric Kiss by director Pierre Salvadori, which the organizers describe as a witty and visually lavish comedy set in 1920s Paris. Salvadori is not a name often spoken here, even though he has spent decades building a recognizable poetics of light, elegant comedy in which something melancholy usually hides beneath the surface. That this particular film opens both Cannes and the Belgrade festival is no accident, but a gesture by which the French Institute makes clear it is not offering the leftovers of the season, but what audiences in France are watching right now.

What does the eighth edition bring?

This year the festival expands from Belgrade to Novi Sad, Zrenjanin, Nis, Gornji Milanovac and Uzice, unfolding in two waves, from June 23 to 28 and then from July 2 to 5. It is organized by the French Institute in Serbia and the MTS Hall, and the biggest change from earlier editions is the setting. The opening moves to the Jevremovac Botanical Garden, which for a film program is not merely a logistical detail but a small dramaturgical decision.

The garden, with its greenhouse dating to 1892 and a shade that Belgrade summers rarely offer, alters the very experience of watching. An open-air screening is always different from a darkened hall, because the sound of the city, the wind and passers-by become part of the experience, whether you want them to or not. A festival that chooses such a space deliberately gives up the technically perfect darkness of the cinema in favor of something closer to a shared summer ritual than to a routine trip to the multiplex.

Why does it matter that the screenings are free?

Here lies the real point of the whole story. The program brings not only the opening title but also other films shown at this year’s Cannes, along with a range of features from current French production. All open-air screenings are free, which in practice means that the freshest European auteur cinema is offered without a ticket, at a moment when local theatrical distribution of such films is growing thinner.

Free admission is not generosity for its own sake. It is cultural policy in miniature, a way to bring an audience that would never otherwise buy a ticket for a 1920s French comedy in front of the screen, by chance or on purpose, and to keep them there. In a city where summer programs often come down to concerts and pop spectacle, six cities offering free French film under the open sky feels almost like a quiet counterpoint. Will you sit on the grass of the botanical garden this June and let a film you have never heard of surprise you?