Dunav Film Fest Opens With House, a Home Not for Sale

The ninth Dunav Film Fest will not open in a darkened theater but inside a fortress: on August 21 at 8 p.m., in the Small Town of Smederevo Fortress, the program opens with a screening of House, the debut feature by director Tanja Brzakovic. The match is almost literal, since a story about a building that needs to be sold is being shown inside a building that is not for sale to anyone.

The plot matters less here than what can be drawn from it, so a brief summary will do. Jovan is an architect of Serbian descent who has spent most of his life in Berlin. After a heart attack, his daughter pressures him to move into a retirement home, and before making that final call, he travels with his grandson Nikola, whom he barely knows, to his native village on Stara Planina to sell the family property. There he learns that an investor, backed by a corrupt system, wants to wipe out what remains of the village, and grandfather and grandson end up on the side of the villagers. The cast includes Miralem Zubcevic, David Stancu, Jelena Bosanac and Anica Dobra.

Who is Tanja Brzakovic, and why did her feature debut take this long?

Brzakovic was born in Belgrade, completed her studies in film and television directing at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, then went on to postgraduate studies at the University of Hamburg, and now lives and works between Berlin and Belgrade. Until now she has written and directed mostly documentaries, on subjects that fiction filmmaking rarely holds onto for more than a single scene: identity, marginalized communities, the processes that quietly push people away from the places where they were born.

Hence the sense that House is not a jump into another genre but a continuation of the same work by other means. A documentary filmmaker who has spent years filming what is disappearing has good reason to start a fiction story from an empty estate rather than from a dramatic twist.

An architect whose blueprint is out of his hands

The main character’s profession is not decoration. A man who spent his career designing other people’s spaces in Berlin returns to a space he cannot design, because it has already been decided somewhere else, in an investor’s paperwork. That split is written into the production itself: House is a coproduction between Serbia (Talas film), Croatia (4Film) and Germany (Filmkraftwerk), supported by the Film Center Serbia (FCS) and the Croatian Audiovisual Centre (HAVC), made along exactly the route the character travels.

The crew behind the camera says the house was treated as a character, not a location. The cinematographer is Aleksandar Kalezic, the production designer is Slobodanka Pilic, and the editor is Branka Pavlovic. In a film whose title is a building, the set design decides whether the audience believes someone actually grew up in that house, and it is work that only shows when it is done badly.

There is also a reason why a film like this opens precisely this festival. Dunav Film Fest brings together works from the ten countries the Danube runs through, a region where the same scene repeats in different languages: empty villages, estates up for sale, descendants arriving from Western cities to sign the paperwork. An opening film usually hints at the line running through the whole program, and this line is drawn clearly.

Six days, four venues, ten countries

The practical framework of the ninth edition looks like this:

• the festival runs from August 21 to 26, 2026, six days in total
• the opening is August 21 at 8 p.m. in the Small Town of Smederevo Fortress
• screenings take place at four venues across Smederevo
• the program consists of films from ten Danube countries, arranged into four program sections
• the competitive format remains in place, with the best film award decided by a professional jury of filmmakers

The rest of the schedule, the guest list and screening times will be published on the festival’s website. Until then, the one fixed point is opening night, when the audience sits inside the fortress and watches a film about how it gets decided what stays standing.