Ravno Selo Film Festival Opens June 25 With Nuremberg

There is something almost defiant about assembling a serious film selection far from the multiplexes and red carpets of the big cities. For nine years running, a single village in Vojvodina becomes, for a few days, a place where people actually watch cinema, and not just any cinema, but the kind that has yet to find its audience. The Ravno Selo Film Festival opens its doors again from June 25 to 28, and this year’s slogan, “Film stories circulate through the village”, is no longer marketing decoration but a fairly precise description of what happens there.

The festival is devoted to first and second films, which immediately sets it apart from the festival circuit that tends to revolve around the same safely proven names. This year’s main programme brings twelve feature films, with the selection signed by Andrej Klemencic, meaning audiences face a programme with a clear authorial stamp rather than a random parade of premieres.

Why do debut films deserve this kind of attention?

The answer lies both in what the festival offers as a prize and in the position it states. The Golden Clip for best debut film carries 1,500 euros, while the Golden Clip for best film chosen by the expert jury carries 1,000 euros. The sums themselves are modest, but their order is eloquent: the debut is rewarded more generously than the best film overall. It is an institutional message rarely heard so plainly, that a debutant director’s first step is worth special support, precisely because it is the hardest and least protected one.

The gala opening on June 25 leans toward spectacle, but a spectacle that stays within the theme. A film music concert is planned with actors and singers from the Terazije Theatre, with Milena Vucic as a special guest. After that overture, the main programme opens with James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg, a psychological thriller in which Russell Crowe and Rami Malek embody two sides of one of the twentieth century’s hardest moral confrontations. The choice is not accidental: a festival that celebrates first steps opens with a film about what happens when historical responsibility is placed under the microscope.

The face in focus and the quiet logic of festival geography

One of the festival’s standing traditions is the “Face in Focus” programme, which each year draws attention to an actress or actor whose work and screen presence deserve to be highlighted. This year’s face in focus is Lenka Petrovic, a young actress the selection describes as possessing distinct artistic potential and confidence before the camera. Done honestly, such programmes are the most accurate thermometer of a national cinema, because they measure not what is already confirmed but what is only now arriving.

It is worth pausing on the venue itself. The decision to plant a festival like this in a village rather than a city hall is no mere eccentricity. It changes the audience’s relationship to film in a way the major festivals can no longer offer, because here cinema is not one commodity in a stream of screenings but an event that gathers an entire community. The post-Yugoslav festival landscape is full of events fighting for visibility in the shadow of a few big names, so any festival that manages to build its own identity and survive nine years is already a small victory of cultural policy from below.

What Ravno Selo does is not a revolution in programming, but it is a consistent and clearly defined gesture. A festival that rewards the debut more generously than the best film, that chooses a village over a city and opens with a film about responsibility, knows what it wants to be. The question for the viewer is not whether this is glamorous enough, but whether we are willing to seek out cinema even where no one serves it to us on a plate. Will you head to the village for a film story this June, or wait, as usual, for it to come to you?