Palic Festival Opens With a German Comedy

There is a moment, every mid-July, when the century-old pines behind the Summer Stage at Palic stop being merely a park and become a backdrop. A screen is stretched between the crowns and the water, the audience settles onto benches that remember both opera and festival dances, and this town in the country’s north decides, for five evenings, to believe in open-air cinema. Tomorrow night that ritual begins for the thirty-third time, and the hosts have chosen to open it with a film that, by its very title, mocks any ceremony.

The film is the German comedy “Oh, That Emptiness, That Terrible Emptiness” by Simon Verhoeven, a director who has become, in recent years, a kind of master of the polite, urban comedy about people who have everything except meaning. Verhoeven does not make films that shout; he makes films that smile while the ground slips out from under you, which is exactly why he is an intriguing choice to open a festival that traditionally favors heavier, slower, authored work.

Why should emptiness open Palic?

The answer, I believe, is dramaturgical. Palic has for decades been a festival of the European margin, of the film that never reaches the multiplex or arrives too late, and it is easy to imagine such a program as a string of grave, dark meditations on transition, borders and loss. Opening it with a comedy about emptiness means holding a mirror up to its own audience: before we spend five days watching Europe talk about its wounds, we allow ourselves to laugh at how tired that same Europe has grown of itself.

The main competition, selected by Nikolaj Nikitin, presents nine European titles, and around them, as ever, a web of some fifteen selections weaves together nearly a hundred films. There are also guest selections from the Gornji Milanovac Film Festival and the Skopje Film Festival, a gesture that keeps Palic what it is, a regional hub rather than merely a pretty place for screenings. The festival, to recall, runs through July 22.

The Lifka awards and the festival dance

The loveliest part of the Palic ritual remains the “Aleksandar Lifka” awards, named after a pioneer of the traveling cinema in these lands and given for contribution to European cinematography. This year they go to actor and director Rados Bajic and to the Hungarian auteur Kornel Mundruczo, a pairing that neatly describes the festival’s range. Bajic is a man of domestic television and of the narrative that built an audience over decades; Mundruczo is an author of a visually distinctive, socially engaged poetics that carried Hungary back to the major festivals.

Placing them side by side is not a compromise but a thesis: that European film can hold both the warm, popular story and the cold, formally ambitious gesture, and that Palic knows how to love both without shame. It remains to be seen whether the audience, beneath those pines tomorrow, will take a comedy about emptiness as a joke at its own expense or as an invitation to ask more seriously what it is we fill our summers with. And you, when you choose between a light and a heavy film at the end of the day, which do you rather surrender to?