Sombor Film Festival: five regional films, free entry

There is a particular kind of summer evening in Sombor when a screen is carried into the courtyards of the town’s civic buildings, chairs are lined up, and the light of a projector is left to do what the very first cinematic light did here a hundred and fifty years ago. That continuity is not a marketing figure but literal geography: the festival now entering its eighth edition unfolds where the local pioneer of moving pictures, Ernest Bosnjak, once set up his machines, and its main prizes, the “Boers”, are named after him.

The program of the eighth Sombor Film Festival, running July 9 to 12 under the motto “Light and Shadows of Reality”, is tighter this year than one might expect from an event with regional ambitions, and that is, paradoxically, its strength. Rather than burying audiences under titles, the selection has been pared down to five works in main competition, from six countries of the Danube and Pannonian region, giving the viewer something the multiplex long ago stopped offering: the chance to actually follow an entire competitive arc across four days.

What is competing in the Sombor courtyards?

Racing for the “Boer” are “Saucesnici” by Marko Novakovic, the Montenegrin “Obraz” by Nikola Vukcevic, “Sorella di Clausura” by Ivana Mladenovic, the Hungarian “Orphan” by Laszlo Nemes and “There Will Be New Summers” by Gvozden Djuric. Even a glance at this quintet shows that the selectors did not choose along national lines but by temperament: these are films that share a taste for intimate, morally uncomfortable situations, for what the motto calls the shadows of reality.

The name of Laszlo Nemes carries the greatest weight here, since he is the author of “Son of Saul”, the Oscar winner that a decade ago redefined how cinema depicts historical trauma, so his new work is legitimately awaited as a yardstick for the rest. Yet the value of a small festival like this lies precisely in the fact that it does not place Nemes on a pedestal above the Serbian and Montenegrin authors, but lets them meet on the same screen, before the same audience, without the hierarchy that distribution budgets otherwise impose.

The focus country of this edition is Slovakia, represented by the award-winning family drama “Perla”, and the choice is not accidental. Slovak cinema has quietly built a reputation over recent seasons as a national output able to marry social precision with emotional restraint, so the visit of “Perla” reads like an invitation to look past the region the audience is used to.

Why is free entry more than a gesture here?

The decision to make admission to all programs free is easily read as a publicity courtesy, but in the context of cultural policy it means something more concrete. A festival that charges no ticket takes on itself the burden of proving that auteur cinema can gather an audience without commercial coercion, and that is the premise on which every serious event outside the big centres ought to rest.

The pre-festival program opens as early as July 8 with the animated film “Ozi: Voice of the Forest”, a shrewd move that draws into the courtyard the very audience that does not usually turn up for festival screenings. This year’s whole setup, moreover, stands under the sign of a hundred and fifty years since the birth of Ernest Bosnjak, so Sombor seems to be consciously building a story about itself as a place with a cinematic past that is not kept in a museum but released onto the screen again every year.

The question such a program always opens remains: will audiences beyond Belgrade and Novi Sad recognise that the most interesting regional cinema of this summer is to be seen precisely in the Sombor courtyards, and will you be there?