Sombor Film Festival Opens With a Tribute to Stojkovic
The eighth edition opened with the film Accomplices and an exhibition on Danilo Bata Stojkovic, while tonight actor Vojislav Brajovic receives the Ernest lifetime achievement award.
- The eighth edition opened on Thursday, July 9, with Marko Novakovic's film Accomplices, with free entry to all five titles in the main selection.
- Tonight, July 10, actor Vojislav Brajovic receives the Ernest lifetime achievement award in the atrium of the City Hall.
- This edition marks 150 years since the birth of Sombor's film pioneer Ernest Bosnjak, for whom the festival's awards are named.
- The event runs through July 12, when the Boer awards for best film, actress, actor and young authors' film are handed out.
When the lights go down in the atrium of Sombor’s City Hall and, for a few hours, the screen takes over the old facade, a town that rarely reaches the film maps of the Balkans turns into its own open-air cinema, and the eighth Sombor Film Festival, which opened on Thursday evening, builds its identity on exactly that overlap of architecture and projection.
The program began at 8.30 p.m. with Accomplices, directed by Marko Novakovic, but the opening evening had started an hour earlier in the gallery of the Laza Kostic Cultural Center, where audiences were met by the exhibition Danilo Bata Stojkovic, 90 Years Since His Birth, devoted to an actor whose face, even now as he would have turned ninety, remains one of the most recognizable signs of Yugoslav cinema. This year’s slogan, Light and Shadows of Reality, thus reads both literally, through the beam of the projector, and figuratively, through the gallery of memory that precedes it.
Why does a small town’s festival look backward?
The programmers’ decision to tie the eighth edition to two names from the past, Bata Stojkovic and Ernest Bosnjak, is not nostalgia for its own sake but an attempt to write a local event into the wider post-Yugoslav canon it belongs to. Bosnjak, the Sombor film pioneer born exactly 150 years ago, is the man after whom the festival’s awards are named, so that anniversary lends this edition a weight that reaches beyond provincial cultural policy and recalls that Sombor itself, long ago, held a frame in the history of domestic film.
Alongside the main selection of five titles, the program includes a strand for young authors, a Slovak Film in Focus block and the cycle If Sombor Were Hollywood, which takes audiences back into the town’s cinematic past. Works from six countries are screened, and the organizer, the Laza Kostic Cultural Center, has kept its decision to make entry to all programs free, a gesture worth naming in an era of ever more expensive festival passes.
The Boer awards and what remains once the lights are off
The central moment of the evening, on Friday, July 10, is the presentation of the Ernest lifetime achievement award to actor Vojislav Brajovic, one of those performers whose craft matured across decades of domestic theatre and film, and whose presence in the City Hall atrium gives this edition a stamp no slogan could carry on its own.
At the closing on July 12, the Boer awards for best film, actress, actor and young authors’ film will be handed out, rounding off the festival’s arc from the archive toward new names. Judging by this setup, Sombor is trying these days to do what larger festivals often forget, to hold a tribute to the past and a space for newcomers in the same frame. When the last screening fades, what will stay with you more, the scene on the screen or the town that briefly became one?
