Sombor Film Festival: Orphan, Accomplices Share Top Prize

When a jury announces, on a Sunday evening in the courtyard of the Laza Kostic Cultural Centre, that the top award goes not to one film but to two, an audience tends to respond in two registers at once: applause and a raised eyebrow. The 8th Sombor Film Festival closed on exactly that faintly ambiguous note, splitting its highest honour evenly between the Hungarian film Orphan by Laszlo Nemes and Accomplices by Marko Novakovic. A decision that declines to choose always carries a little diplomacy, but also an honest admission that two very different films reached the same level.

The festival, run for eight years now by the Laza Kostic Cultural Centre, gathered work from six countries this season, opened with Accomplices and an exhibition dedicated to the late actor Danilo Bata Stojkovic, and preserved a rare Sombor gesture: entry to every programme was free. In a festival economy where prestige is usually measured by ticket price and red carpet, that is an almost subversive move.

Two winners, one courtyard ceremony

Orphan is signed by Laszlo Nemes, the director the wider world knows from the Oscar-winning Son of Saul, and his handwriting stays recognisable here: a camera pressed against a face, history bearing down from behind, a child as the last remaining moral compass. Accomplices, by contrast, builds a domestic, denser, more chamber-like world in which guilt is not historical but intimate, distributed across small silences and sentences left unsaid. That these two sensibilities ended up on the same podium suggests that the jury, chaired by Aleksandar Erdeljanovic, preferred to reward two ways of seeing rather than one winning formula.

The Boer acting awards reinforced that balance. Nevena Nerandzic was honoured for the role of Sofija in Accomplices, a character who carries the film precisely by refusing to be one-dimensional, while Bojtorjan Barabas took best actor for Andor Hirs in Orphan. In the young authors selection the winner was Cat’s Cry by Sanja Zivkovic, and that detail is no footnote: the Sombor programme has stubbornly held for years to the idea that new authors should be shown before the big houses discover and reformat them.

Why a shared award is not a compromise

There is a lazy assumption that a divided prize means the jury could not decide. In the Sombor case the opposite is closer to the truth. Orphan and Accomplices are not competing in the same discipline: one works on a large historical canvas, the other in the cramped room of contemporary guilt, and it is hard to imagine a criterion by which one would cancel out the other. Here the shared award functions as an editorial statement, the festival saying that regional cinema in a single year can be both epic and chamber-scaled, and that this is not a contradiction but a wealth.

For Sombor, a town also marking one hundred and fifty years since the birth of Ernest Bosnjak, one of the pioneers of domestic film, that conclusion carries symbolic weight too. A festival with no admission charge and a jury that rewards range instead of formula hardly fits the logic of the festival race, but perhaps that is exactly why it remains a place where film is watched rather than merely bid upon. Do you think an evenly shared award gives a film more attention, or quietly takes some of it away?