Palic Warm-Up: Regional Selection Opens in Subotica

The century-old pines behind the Summer Stage on Lake Palic still remember the opera arias for which the venue was built in 1950, designed by engineer Baltazar Dulic, who searched the heart of the Great Park for the spot with the finest acoustics. This July, European cinema steps in front of them again, but before the floodlights come on beside the lake, the festival warms up in town.

The 33rd Palic European Film Festival officially opens on July 18 and runs through July 22, in Palic and Subotica. The pre-festival stretch, however, begins today, and that is where the real news lies for anyone unwilling to wait for the opening ceremony: the Best of Region selection runs from July 11 to 15 at Subotica’s Eurocinema, turning the northern Vojvodina city into a small capital of regional auteur cinema for a week.

Best of Region opens the film week in Subotica

Five titles from the regional selection serve as an overture, the space where the festival most often uncovers voices still working their way toward the major festival circuit. Palic has a long tradition here: the regional program has never been mere scheduling filler but a deliberate insistence on the post-Yugoslav context, on films that share a language, a history and a way of staying silent about that history. For audiences in Subotica, it means a chance to see, a week early, what will only later reach cinemas and other festivals.

The main Best of Europe selection brings seven titles, and here the festival’s ambition, at odds with its modest infrastructure, becomes clear. The program includes Sentimental Value by Joachim Trier, the Norwegian director whose poetics of family unease rarely miss, then La Grazia by Paolo Sorrentino, an auteur known for his recognizable visual design and baroque irony, and Young Mothers by the Dardenne brothers, who have chronicled Belgian everyday life with near-documentary patience for decades. Alongside them, the program is rounded out by the Best of Region selection and Europe 4Kids, with seven films and a choice of short forms.

Why does Palic still choose only Europe?

The answer is partly a matter of identity, partly of defiance. Palic is one of the few festivals in the world with almost exclusively European content, and that choice is not a marketing gimmick but cultural policy in miniature. While larger festivals scramble for Hollywood premieres and red carpets, Palic insists that European cinema has enough force to carry a five-day program on its own, from Nordic melancholy to Mediterranean splendor.

There is something almost stubborn about watching the season’s biggest names under open sky, on a wooden stage three quarters of a century old, while mosquitoes from the lake take equal part in the screening. Yet it is precisely that lack of polish that makes Palic what it is: a festival that returns film to the community rather than to a glass hall. The regional selection beginning today is only the first hint of that atmosphere.

Will you catch this year’s Palic in a Subotica screening room, or wait for the starry sky above the Summer Stage?