Cinematheque and cinemas: the new Odyssey arrives this week

There is one moment in a cinema hall that has not changed in decades: the lights go down, the murmur fades, and the screen glows before anything on it begins to happen. Those few seconds of silence before the image are, in a way, the heart of what mid-June offers Belgrade audiences this year. The schedule forks in two directions that rarely stand side by side, yet this week they do: the blockbuster still to come and the canon that returns.

On June 17, multiplexes open a new adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, a film promoted for months as one of the more ambitious attempts to translate the ancient epic into the language of contemporary spectacle. Two days later, on June 19, Toy Story 5 arrives, the next chapter in a franchise that long ago moved from the nursery into the collective memory of several generations. These are two entirely different registers, one leaning on myth and scale, the other on nostalgia and familiar faces, but both bet on the same thing: that audiences still want to sit in the dark and let the image carry them.

Why is the Cinematheque pushing classics the same week?

The answer is partly stubbornness and partly logic. While distributors fill halls with premieres, the Yugoslav Cinematheque returns the restored 1984 film O pokojniku sve najlepse to the screen on June 17, a comedy that, in the Yugoslav context, long ago became more than a genre label. Restoration here is not merely a technical exercise; it is a gesture, a reminder that a film lives not only in the moment of its premiere but also in what we choose to preserve and watch again.

Alongside the local classic, the program brings Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, one of those films that split audiences between those it hypnotizes and those it exhausts, but which is rarely shown on the large screen it deserves. That, in fact, is the most interesting part of this week’s lineup: the chance to return works we usually watch on phone or laptop screens to the space they were imagined for.

Who is the Nathalie Baye tribute for?

On June 19, the Cinematheque dedicates its screenings to the memory of Nathalie Baye, the French actress whose body of work marked several decades of European auteur cinema. Tributes of this kind can easily slide into pure formality, a string of titles with no clear reason behind them, but when assembled with care they do something else: they put back into circulation the acting choices and roles that, beyond the circle of cinephiles, had begun to fade from memory.

What makes this week unusual is not any single title but the fact that, in the same part of the city and within a few days, two ideas about what cinema is for collide. One says film is an event happening now, with queues at the box office and the rustle of a premiere. The other says film is something that endures, that gets restored, remembered and shown again long after the novelty has worn off. We rarely see them this close together as we do this mid-June.

And when you choose where to spend an evening at the cinema, what decides it for you: the pull of a premiere happening right now, or curiosity about a classic you may have skipped?