Bajic and Mundruczo Win Aleksandar Lifka Award at Palic
Ahead of the 33rd Palic European Film Festival, the Aleksandar Lifka award goes to Serbian actor and director Rados Bajic and Hungarian auteur Kornel Mundruczo.
- The Aleksandar Lifka award for domestic film goes to actor, screenwriter and director Rados Bajic.
- In the foreign category, the laureate is Hungarian director Kornel Mundruczo.
- The 33rd Palic European Film Festival runs from July 18 to July 22 at the Summer Stage.
- It opens with the German film "Oh That Emptiness, That Terrible Emptiness" by director Simon Verhoeven.
The name of Aleksandar Lifka, the traveling-cinema pioneer who a century ago carried moving pictures across the towns of Vojvodina as a kind of small miracle, has for years sat above the main festival prize at Palic, and precisely because of that link to the very beginnings of watching film, every new name on the list of laureates reads like a quiet comment on what a national cinema, at a given moment, considers worth remembering. This year that comment reads: Rados Bajic and Kornel Mundruczo.
The decision was announced ahead of the 33rd Palic European Film Festival, held from July 18 to 22 at the Summer Stage, in that frame of the lake and evening light that long ago became the festival’s signature. The Aleksandar Lifka award is given for contribution to European cinema, and this year it is split two ways: a domestic author and a foreign one.
Why Bajic and Mundruczo?
Rados Bajic is a choice that resists being reduced to a single genre or a single role. Actor, screenwriter and director, he has spent decades working at the intersection of the popular and the authorial, building characters and stories that found their audience without intermediaries, often outside the big production machinery. In his case the award for domestic film is not recognition for one title, but for the persistence of a directorial and acting sensibility that always knew how to speak to the viewer in a language they understood.
Kornel Mundruczo, on the other hand, belongs to the strand of contemporary European film that does not shy away from discomfort. The Hungarian director is known for a camera that rarely sits still, and for themes, from the bond between humans and animals to intimate family fractures, that almost as a rule touch on what polite society prefers to leave unspoken. His name in the foreign category places Palic among festivals that pick creators as laureates, not merely famous surnames.
What is interesting is the very span between these two choices. The same stage will hold an author deeply rooted in the domestic context and one whose language is emphatically European, almost without a local accent. Rather than reading that as inconsistency, it is better understood as the jury using the award as a dramatic arc: from what is closest to us to what unsettles us most.
What the 33rd edition brings
The official opening is set for July 18 at 9 p.m., with a screening of the German film “Oh That Emptiness, That Terrible Emptiness” by director Simon Verhoeven, a title that by its very name signals a tone far from summer lightness. Palic rarely offers a festival postcard anyway; its programme more often asks for a viewer willing to stay awake past the final shot.
Before the main programme begins, audiences in Subotica can catch the pre-festival strand at the Eurocinema, where the “Best of the Region” selection runs until July 15. It is that quiet overture which gives festivals like Palic their continuity, a programme that chases no red carpet but tries to map regional production before the spotlights move to the lake.
For decades Palic has held to the idea that film is not only an industry but a way of seeing, and this year’s choice of laureates is best read in that key. Will you feel closer to the author who speaks your language, or to the one who deliberately pulls you out of your comfort zone?
