Serbian screenplay festival turns 50 and builds a castle

The 50th Serbian Screenplay Festival will not be sending its winners home with a plaque this year. It will be sending them home with a castle. The new Golden, Silver and Bronze Castle awards take their name from the building General Jovan Belimarkovic raised in Vrnjacka Banja between 1888 and 1892, now known locally as the Castle of Culture. A festival built around the written word has gone looking for its metaphor in stone older than itself, and that is one of the few changes in this jubilee edition that is more than ceremonial.

The full program was presented on July 30 at the MTS Hall in Belgrade, and the festival itself runs from August 9 to 13 under the slogan Half a Century of Golden Words. Fifteen titles are screening in all: 13 of them compete, while “Room 23” and “The Harvest” sit outside the race in the sidebar section “Over the Fence”. The opening night belongs to “Hajduk u Beogradu”, screened at the summer stage of the Danilo Bata Stojkovic amphitheatre.

The 13 films competing

The competition lineup is:

• “Hajduk u Beogradu”
• “A Bird on the Elephant Path”
• “There Will Be New Summers”
• “A Christmas Adventure”
• “For Better or Worse”
• “Mileva Einstein”
• “The Duplicate”
• “Cat’s Cry”
• “The General”
• “Accomplices”
• “The Return of the Zika Dynasty”
• “Mother-of-Pearl Fog”
• “A Sporting Heart”

Four of them arrive as gala premieres: “A Bird on the Elephant Path”, “A Christmas Adventure”, “For Better or Worse” and “The Duplicate”. The selection was made by Ivana Vujic, and its range tracks what Serbian production actually delivered this season, from a biopic about Mileva Einstein to another instalment of the Zika Dynasty comedies. No Serbian programmer gets to choose beyond what was shot, which is why this list also reads as a snapshot of the year.

Why “The Duplicate” matters most here

Because it is the only film in the program that exists because of the festival itself. It was shot from the screenplay that won last year’s competition, meaning the road from prize-winning manuscript to premiere took a single season. This year’s open call for best original screenplay drew more than 350 entries, so the fair question is which of them gets the same treatment in 2027.

That is also the strongest argument for events like this one. A prize for a text nobody films stays paper, and Vrnjacka Banja is one of the few places where that paper occasionally turns into a screening.

Who decides, and what is on offer

The main jury is Svetislav Basara, who chairs it, Biljana Maksic and Milos Jankovic, with the results announced on August 13. The journalists’ jury consists of Zorica Dragojevic, Aleksandar Gajovic, Branimir Lokner and Ljubomir Radanov.

Alongside the three castles, the festival hands out:

• the Gordan Mihic Golden Pen for contribution to screenwriting
• the Marko Zivic award for best young actor
• the Gorki List audience award
• the Slavko Lazarevic journalists’ award

The audience award again comes from Gorki List, and company representative Katarina Krstajic confirmed at the press conference that it goes to whichever film wins over the crowd.

Half a century, and one open call

The festival was launched in 1977 by Bosko Rudjincanin, Niki Stamenkovic, Dusan Perkovic, Vasiljka Bogicevic and Bata Zivojinovic. Sasa Milenkovic, director of the Vrnjacka Banja Cultural Centre, said the plaques intended for the founders will be handed to their heirs.

Sadly, none of them are with us any more, but their heirs are.

That first call, back in 1977, was won by Predrag Perisic, whose screenplay became “The Love Life of Budimir Trajkovic”. Perisic returns this year as a guest of honour and the film screens again. The Dr Dusan Radic public library hosts the launch of a monograph covering the festival’s 50 years, a poster exhibition and a program devoted to past winners.

Executive producer Marko Jovicic used the anniversary to answer the yearly grumbling over who did and did not make the selection.

When the hundredth festival comes around, will anyone remember who got angry back then, or will everyone remember who was in the competition program?

The ceremonies are hosted by Mirka Vasiljevic and Miljan Prljeta, the latter for the seventh time. The organiser is the Vrnjacka Banja Cultural Centre, and Vujic closed the press conference with a line easier to remember than any prize list.

Long live the screenplay, long live film and all those people who give it their marrow.

For five days in August that sounds like a toast. For an open call that takes in more than three hundred manuscripts a year and gets one of them filmed, it sounds like unfinished business.