Sombor Film Festival: Voja Brajovic Wins Ernest Award

Few towns in Serbia can talk about cinema from their own back yard, and Sombor is one of the rare ones. More than a century ago, when the cinema was still a fairground attraction folded and unfolded at country fairs, a local man named Ernest Bosnjak was raising a film studio in the middle of a plain where nothing of the sort was taken for granted. The eighth Sombor Film Festival, which opens on July 9, builds its foundation on exactly that local and rather stubborn history, rather than borrowing its shine from elsewhere.

Organised by the Laza Kostic Cultural Centre, this year the festival carries the slogan Light and Shadows of Reality and runs until July 12. The main competition holds five regional works from six countries, and entry to all screenings, talks and side programmes remains free, which in today’s cultural politics is no small thing but a clear statement about who cinema belongs to.

Why Sombor and Ernest Bosnjak?

This year’s edition marks 150 years since the birth of Ernest Bosnjak, the man after whom the festival names its main prize. Bosnjak was one of those enterprising individuals from the early twentieth century who believed that moving pictures were not a passing fashion, and who, instead of waiting for approval from the centre, built production in the provinces themselves. By tying its highest title to his name, Sombor refuses to be just another dot on the map of summer screenings and insists that it is part of Serbian film genealogy, not an audience seated in its background.

The gesture has a wider meaning too. In the post-Yugoslav context, where film history is often read only through the big studios of the capitals, recalling a pioneer from the Vojvodina plain shifts the centre of gravity and restores dignity to the idea of local initiative. The festival therefore works on two fronts, celebrating a past that few ever mention while building a programme that links that past to contemporary regional production.

Five films and one Ernest for Voja Brajovic

The competition is led by the Serbian film Accomplices by Marko Novakovic and the Montenegrin Honour by Nikola Vukcevic, two titles whose subjects already signal that this year’s selection will not shy away from discomfort. Alongside them, the main line-up gathers five films from six countries, enough for four days to convey what a regional festival looks like when it meets on a single screen, with no need to justify itself before bigger names.

The Ernest award for contribution to the art of film goes this year to Voja Brajovic, one of the most recognisable faces of the domestic and regional scene, an actor whose career long ago outgrew any single role and became part of the collective memory of several generations. The decision to give a prize bearing the name of the Sombor pioneer to an actor of such standing is no accident, for it joins the beginning and the maturity of a national cinema in one gesture.

What makes this edition worth attention is not the list of titles in itself, but the persistent idea that a festival can be built from its own identity rather than as a copy of larger events. Free entry here is not a marketing trick but the logical continuation of that idea, an invitation to the public to be participants rather than customers. Will festivals like this, ones that draw their story from their own back yard, be the very ones that keep film culture alive beyond the big centres?