Electric Kiss Opens the French Film Festival in Belgrade
The eighth French Film Festival opens under the open sky of the Botanical Garden, with nine contemporary works touring six Serbian cities over two weeks.
- The eighth French Film Festival opens tonight, June 23 at 9 p.m., at the Jevremovac Botanical Garden in Belgrade.
- It opens with the comedy "Electric Kiss" by director Pierre Salvadori.
- The festival runs from June 23 to 28 and from July 2 to 5, across 12 venues.
- Nine contemporary French films will screen in six Serbian cities.
There is something almost defiant in the idea of staging a summer film selection beneath the canopy of the Botanical Garden, where every rustle of leaves and every mosquito competes with the projection. And it is precisely that risk, that a film has to win you over despite the night breathing around you, that gives tonight’s opening of the eighth French Film Festival a register no darkened auditorium ever achieves. The screen set between the glasshouse and the old trees is not stage decoration; it is part of the offer.
The programme begins at 9 p.m., once it is dark enough, with Pierre Salvadori’s comedy “Electric Kiss”. Salvadori has built an entire career on the fine line between farce and melancholy, on characters who pretend to know what they are doing while their lives fall apart in their hands. Choosing his film to open is no accident: a festival that begins with a comedy refuses in advance to take itself too solemnly, which is, let us admit, refreshing.
Why nine films, and why beyond Belgrade?
A selection of nine contemporary works is not large, but that is the point. The festival does not try to be an encyclopaedia of French production; it is a carefully chosen cross-section that rolls through six cities. Alongside Belgrade there are Novi Sad, Nis, Zrenjanin, Gornji Milanovac and Uzice, across twelve venues in total. The schedule is split into two waves, June 23 to 28 and July 2 to 5, giving audiences outside the capital a real rather than symbolic chance to take a seat.
That geographical reach may well be the most important decision of this edition. It is easy to reduce French cinema to a Parisian salon, to conversations over wine and long takes of silence. But when that same film screens in Gornji Milanovac or Uzice, it stops being an exotic curiosity and becomes simply a good film. Decentralisation here is a dramaturgical move, not a logistical formality.
What does the selection actually offer the viewer?
Among the titles, the historical drama “Rays and Shadows” stands out, starring Jean Dujardin, an actor who after his Oscar for “The Artist” could have chosen comfortable roles yet keeps choosing the harder ones. His presence is not marketing bait but a signal that this year’s selection does not shy away from seriousness, even when it opens with a comedy.
What links the varied titles, from Salvadori’s humour to Dujardin’s historical drama, is a refusal to treat the viewer as a passive consumer. Contemporary French cinema, at least the kind that reaches festival selections, still believes audiences can bear ambiguity, that not every ending owes us a resolution. That is, today, almost subversive.
There is, of course, the other side of the story. An open-air festival lives and dies by the weather, and a Belgrade summer can be capricious. There is also the question of how fully audiences outside the big cities will fill twelve venues across two separate windows. But these are questions of organisation, not of art, and they do not change the fact that the programme has been chosen with care.
If “French film” has so far sounded to you like code for something slow and remote, tonight at the Botanical Garden you have a chance to test how right you were, or how wrong. And you, when did you last watch a film under the open sky, and does the sound of the night pull you away from the screen, or instead draw you deeper into it?
