Palic Film Festival Closes, 'Nino in Paradise' Wins Award

The summer stage beside Lake Palic has a quality no cinema hall can fake: once darkness falls, the film has to compete with the water, the crickets and the occasional distant train, and despite all of that, a good film always wins. That is how the final evening of this year’s edition went, when the lights over the screen dimmed so they could be raised over the lectern, and the festival’s steady rhythm of screenings, conversations and late walks along the shore paused so names could finally be read out.

The 33rd European Film Festival Palic has officially closed, and its main award, the Golden Tower, went to the Belgian film “Nino in Paradise” by director Laurent Micheli. The jury’s decision has its own inner logic: Palic has long favoured films that observe rather than shout, films where the dramatic arc is built patiently, almost imperceptibly, until the final third reveals that something large has been at stake all along.

What the Golden Tower says about this festival

Palic has never been a red-carpet festival, and that is precisely its strength. In the post-Yugoslav landscape it has remained a place where European auteur cinema meets an audience that comes for the film rather than for the photographs. The award for a Belgian title confirms a course this festival holds stubbornly: to place the director’s signature at the centre, not the origin of the production or the size of the budget. The Creative Europe programme behind the event, alongside the Open University Subotica, is no footnote here; it is the infrastructure that lets small European films be seen at all beyond their home markets.

The German filmmaker Helena Wittmann received the “Underground Spirit” award, a prize that by definition goes to whoever refuses to fit in, and that category may be the most honest part of Palic’s identity. It exists to reward risk rather than consensus, and every year it reminds us that the festival does not measure worth by ticket sales.

Why is the award to Rados Bajic more than protocol?

The name that resonated most with the domestic audience this year did not, however, come from the competition. The “Aleksandar Lifka” award, given for a lasting contribution to European cinema, went to Rados Bajic, an actor and director whose biography is, to a large degree, the biography of an entire layer of Serbian film and television. The Lifka is not a prize for one film but for perseverance, for the ability to stay for decades in a trade that rarely forgives, and to keep a recognisable authorial voice while doing so.

Such honours can easily slide into ceremony, into applause offered out of politeness. What saves them is context: Bajic is an author who built his audience patiently, outside the trends, and his award at Palic closes a circle in which a domestic author is measured by the same standard as the European guests. The festival, then, does not end in spectacle but in a quiet confirmation that continuity still means something.

That leaves the question Palic reopens every year for the audience returning home from the lake: do we need more a festival that hands out awards, or one that persuades us to stay behind and talk after the film, and which of the two do you think Palic truly is?