Palic Raises the Curtain: Lifka Award to Bajic, Mundruczo

There is something about the Summer Stage at Palic that no modern auditorium with flawless acoustics can quite replace, and it is the moment when the light over the lake slowly fades, when the evening air carries a little moisture off the water, and when the screen begins to breathe together with an audience seated under the open sky. That exact moment repeats itself tonight at nine o’clock for the 33rd time, and it is precisely for that moment that Palic remains a festival measured less by the number of titles in its program than by the temperature of the evening it leaves in the viewer’s memory.

The 33rd edition of the European Film Festival runs from today through July 22, across two addresses that have long overlapped, Palic and nearby Subotica, and it opens with a German comedy by director Simon Verhoeven. Choosing a comedy for the opening night is no accidental gesture, because a festival that offers roughly 100 films and a string of conversations with authors over five days knows that audiences first need to be given room to breathe, and only then the weight.

Why does the award go to a local and a foreign author at once?

The central ritual of this year’s Palic is the presentation of the Aleksandar Lifka Award, a recognition that carries the name of a pioneer of film exhibition in this region and is given for contribution to European cinema. This year the festival decided to split the honor, and that is not mere administrative symmetry. The local half goes to Rados Bajic, an actor, screenwriter and director with more than 100 roles behind him and several authored projects that have shaped domestic television and film production over recent decades. The foreign half goes to Kornel Mundruczo, the Hungarian director whose filmmaking has traveled the most important European festival circuits for years.

Placing these two names on the same stage says more about how the festival understands itself than about the laureates themselves. Palic has spent decades trying to draw an equals sign between the regional and the European, to treat an author from this part of the world not as a guest at someone else’s celebration but as an equal part of the same canon. Bajic and Mundruczo come from different traditions, from different relationships with audience and frame, yet the festival places them under the same spotlight tonight, and it is exactly in that gesture that its cultural politics lies.

What Palic protects when it protects a ritual

Bajic has in recent years leaned toward more demanding, dramatic roles, while as an author he moves in a recognizable register of stories about community, faith and memory. Mundruczo, by contrast, builds film as a taut dramaturgical machine, prone to radical cuts and the bodily immediacy of the image. Setting them side by side means admitting that European film is not one language but a multitude of dialects that meet at Palic without any need to declare one of them the main tongue.

In a post-Yugoslav context, that is more than festival courtesy. For years Palic has worked to accustom the local viewer to watching domestic film in the same breath as Hungarian, German or French, without complexes and without overrating. The award shared this evening between a spirit rooted in Subotica and an address in Budapest is simply that program translated into a single ceremonial gesture.

So tonight’s opening is not merely the start of a five-day screening, but a reminder that a festival survives as long as there is someone willing to sit beneath a screen by the lake and let the evening be shaped by someone else’s images. Will you let Palic surprise you this week with a film you did not even know existed until last night?