Trier and Sorrentino Headline Palic Festival Lineup

There is something almost stubborn in the idea of watching the newest European auteur cinema under an open sky, on a stone summer stage ringed by century-old pines, while the damp rises off the lake and a projector throws its light onto a screen older than most of the audience. For years Palic has defended exactly this kind of ritual, slow, concentrated, a little displaced from the logic of the multiplex, and now, with the pre-festival program at Subotica’s Eurocinema wrapped up between July 4 and 10, the festival has revealed the reason people actually come: the star-studded main program.

The 33rd edition opens on July 18 and, judging by the names, this year holds nothing back. The main competitive and revue selection rests on three sections, of which Best of Europe brings seven titles, Best of Region five, and Europe 4Kids seven films alongside a short-film selection for the youngest viewers. It is a structure Palic has kept for some time, but this year the content inside that structure reads like a cross-section of where European film stands right now.

Who is coming in the Best of Europe section?

The roster of directors in the main European selection reads like a reminder of how dense the continent still is behind the camera. There is new work by Joachim Trier, the Norwegian who became one of the most sought-after names on the European scene after the success of his previous film, and by Paolo Sorrentino, whose directorial poetics still split audiences between those it seduces and those it wears out. Alongside them, the Dardenne brothers, the doyens of Belgian social realism, deliver another of their precise, unadorned portraits of working-class daily life, while Agnieszka Holland remains a voice that rarely chooses comfortable subjects.

The selection is rounded out by Sergei Loznitsa, whose documentary and fiction work relentlessly interrogates history and power, the Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, who in recent years has become one of the most important names in Mediterranean cinema, and Spain’s Oliver Laxe. For a festival built on one hundred percent European content, this is the kind of program that need not justify itself to an audience, the names do the work on their own.

The Best of Region section should not be overlooked either, as it gives Palic its specific, post-Yugoslav context. Films by Nikola Vukcevic, Vladimir Tagic, Milorad Milinkovic and Marko Backovic place domestic and regional cinema in the same space as Europe’s heavyweights, a gesture Palic has never treated as a concession but as an equal dialogue.

Why does the Golden Tower still mean something?

At a time when festival circuits multiply and awards are handed out to the point of inflation, Palic has kept two things that give it weight: the Golden Tower for best film and the Aleksandar Lifka award for contribution to European cinema, named after a pioneer of film exhibition in this region. The first chooses the future, the second guards the memory, and it is precisely that balance that explains why the festival never feels like a mere revue of titles you will end up streaming by autumn anyway.

The cultural politics of this festival have always been discreet but clear: bring auteur cinema to where it otherwise never reaches, and let the landscape around the lake do its part of the work. And so the same question returns each year, whether the crowd gathering beneath the pines will recognize that, between two summer stretches of projection-hall darkness, it is being offered a cross-section of the most serious work Europe is filming right now. Will you sit down at Palic this year to see Trier and Sorrentino under the open sky, or wait for an algorithm to serve them up on your phone screen?