Bitef Down to Two Shows as Marina Otero Withdraws Kill Me
Argentine director Marina Otero has withdrawn Kill Me from the 59th Bitef, the fifth cancellation. Two shows remain in the program, and organizers say new contracts will be signed next week.
The slogan of the 59th Bitef reads “Dare to Find Out.” Over the past few weeks that line has come to mean something other than what it was written for, since what audiences are finding out mostly amounts to a list of who is not coming.
Argentine director Marina Otero withdrew her production Kill Me (translated locally as Ubij me) from the Belgrade International Theatre Festival (Bitef) program on August 2, 2026. It is the fifth of seven shows originally chosen by artistic director Spasoje Z. Markovic, and the first withdrawal after which the situation can no longer be discussed as a string of individual cancellations. When most of a program pulls out, that stops being a series of incidents. It becomes the state of the festival.
Four productions had already withdrawn before her:
- Audition by the Portuguese company Teatro Praga
- Anhovo by Ziga Divjak, produced by the Slovenian National Theatre Nova Gorica
- Frankenstein Diptych by the Italian company Motus
- When I Saw the Sea by Lebanese choreographer and director Ali Sahrur
All of them cite the same reason: solidarity with artists, students, teachers and activists in Serbia who are demanding justice and freedom of expression.
A decision with a measurable cost
Otero said her decision followed several weeks of deliberation, research and conversations with people familiar with the situation in Serbia, the country’s history and the festival’s own history. Her team also weighed performing the show as planned and delivering a message of support from the stage, but concluded that withdrawing from the program was the more effective form of solidarity. Only after that came the other calculation, the financial one:
“Canceling the ‘Kill Me’ performance involves significant financial costs. Despite that, I am certain this is the right decision,” Marina Otero said in a statement.
That sentence is the only part of the statement that can actually be measured. A canceled international tour means lost fees, canceled bookings and costs that stay with the production, and the director puts that front and center rather than stopping at a declaration. She also ties her decision to her personal opposition to Zionism and imperialism and to structures of power that, she says, threaten rights and freedom of expression, describing the withdrawal as temporary, lasting until conditions align with the festival’s historical values and the views of the local artistic community.
In other words, she is invoking Bitef against Bitef. Her argument is not that the festival is bad, but that this year it does not live up to what it built itself to be.
What is left in the program?
Two shows remain from the original lineup. The Medea Object, directed by Diego de Brea, a coproduction between the Montenegrin National Theatre and the Bar Cultural Centre, and Black Gold, based on a text by Dejan Dukovski, directed by Oliver Frljic and produced by the Belgrade Drama Theatre.
Both are regional productions. Neither is from abroad.
That detail tends to get lost in reports about the cancellations, yet it matters more than the raw count. The “I” in Bitef stands for International, and the festival’s point from the start was to bring to Belgrade what otherwise does not play here. A festival with seven titles can survive losing one guest production. A festival left with two regional productions stops being a showcase and turns into a regular repertoire with a festive name.
Seven shows in five weeks
Bitef’s management insists the festival will go ahead as planned with seven shows on the program, with contracts for new titles to be signed over the coming week. The dates stay in mid September, per the last published schedule, September 16 to 20.
The math is easy for anyone who has ever brought a production in from abroad. From signing to opening night is roughly five weeks, in which a technical rider has to be agreed, the text translated, subtitles prepared, sets shipped across borders and an ensemble’s schedule squared with commitments already booked elsewhere for September. That is enough time to bring in a show. It is not enough time to build a selection.
That is why the real loss of this year’s edition is hard to capture in a number of canceled titles. Curating a lineup is work that takes months and is defended by standing as a whole, while what is now being assembled follows a single criterion: availability. In September, audiences will most likely see five shows chosen not for what they are, but because they were able to come.
Bitef has weathered seasons before in which the program fell short of its ambitions. This time the question is not how strong the lineup will be, but whether what plays in September can still be called a selection at all. The list arriving next week will answer that.
