Pozarevac Children's Festival Charges Five Cans a Ticket

At the entrance to the Pozarevac Cultural Center this fall, a banknote will be worth nothing. An empty can will, and visitors need at least five of them, because tickets for the fifth edition of Cans Teatar Fest are not bought, they are collected. Hand over used aluminum packaging and you get an ALU COIN, an eco currency made of aluminum, and only that token buys the actual ticket to a show. Bring more than the minimum and you earn extra coins, which can then be spent at the Cans Bazaar, where school supplies are waiting.

The fifth edition of Cans Teatar Fest, an international children’s theater festival, runs from September 9 to 13, 2026. The lineup includes nine plays from six countries: Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria and Slovakia. The program was put together by actress and director Valentina Pavlicic, the festival’s artistic director and curator, while Novica Pavlicic serves as the event’s director.

A Festival Without a Home City

Cans Teatar Fest has no permanent host city, and that is by design rather than oversight. It has previously traveled to Novi Sad, Sombor, Kikinda and Krusevac, so every edition starts from scratch: new audiences, new partners and a new generation of children who first have to learn that an empty can is worth something. What travels with the festival is not the stage set, it is the rule about the ticket. That rule is what children remember it by, long before they remember the names of the visiting troupes.

Why Does This Year’s Ticket Have a Second Purpose?

The new element in the fifth edition is a charitable goal. Money raised from selling the collected packaging for recycling goes toward opening a library at the Children’s Ward of the Pozarevac hospital. Last year’s Krusevac edition collected 65,000 cans, which gives a rough sense of the scale involved here. The ticket ends up living three lives: first an admission pass, then raw material, and finally a shelf of books in a hospital room.

The festival’s artistic director framed the announcement around the image of a snowball:

“This year, the children of Pozarevac and their families will have a unique opportunity to join forces and do something good and useful for themselves, their city, their country and the planet. A small effort, something good they do, will grow like a snowball rolling downhill into something big and beautiful. Into an experience they will remember and retell for a long time, one that will also carry a humanitarian outcome. Every empty, used can that families bring to the festival will be sent for recycling, and the proceeds will go toward opening a library at the Children’s Ward of the Pozarevac hospital. We look forward to seeing so many smiles on the children’s faces, to all the new friends of the festival, as well as those who have been with us for a long time. And to the artists who will travel here and create magic on stage that connects all of us, even after the festival curtain falls and we move on to a new city,” said Valentina Pavlicic.

Behind that image sits a fairly simple calculation. A child searching the house, the building entrance and the neighborhood for five cans learns two things at once, and neither of them comes from a lecture.

What Is on Stage in Pozarevac

The Cans Teatar Fest program opens on September 9 at 6 p.m., following a carnival parade expected to draw around 500 children from Pozarevac. First on stage is a Croatian acrobatic and juggling story about a traveling circus family. The full lineup:

• “Trio Rio,” Pozega City Theatre
• “The Wizard of Oz,” Pristina-Gracanica National Theatre
• “The Suspicious Person,” Okret Theatre from Belgrade, a new adaptation of a Nusic play
• “Let’s Dance Fairy Tales,” the Una Saga Serbica troupe
• “Stage Fright: A Play for Practicing Difficult Situations,” from Montenegro
• “The Long Road to School,” from Bulgaria
• “Filipko and Baba Yaga,” from Slovakia
• “Why They Don’t Care,” Sarajevo Youth Theatre
• “Winnie the Pooh,” the Zemun puppet theater “Pinokio”

The environmental theme is not left to the ticket mechanism alone. The Sarajevo production “Why They Don’t Care” deals with climate change through the story of animals losing their homes, so what happens with hands at the entrance gets reopened as a question on stage. That kind of dramaturgical arc is rare in children’s programming, where the message is usually tacked on at the end of the show.

Aluminum as an Argument

Cans Teatar Fest’s long-running partner is the company Ball, whose regional commercial director Nenad Djurdjevic defends the can as a raw material, not as trash:

“The can is one of the best examples of the circular economy in action. Aluminum can be recycled again and again without any loss of quality, which is why a used can is a valuable resource,” said Nenad Djurdjevic.

Djurdjevic also said that around 76 percent of aluminum beverage cans produced in Europe are recycled, and that processing them saves up to 95 percent of the energy needed to produce aluminum from primary material.

Side Program

Alongside the plays, Cans Teatar Fest also offers activities outside the theater hall:

• A Cans chess tournament, played with pieces made from cans, where the youngest visitors compete against young chess players from Pozarevac
• The Klett publishing house’s “Little Can Bookshop,” a corner dedicated to books and reading
• An art zone with the Pixelata installation, made of cans, painted by street artists throughout the festival
• A financial literacy workshop run by OTP Bank

The festival is supported by the City of Pozarevac and the Ministry of Culture, and alongside Ball its partners include Bambi, OTP Bank, Knjaz Milos, Klett and Transfera.

Cans Teatar Fest is easy to describe as a clever idea and hard to run as logistics, since someone has to count, pack and transport tens of thousands of cans while nine plays go on over five days on stage. The real measure of this edition will not be the length of the program. It will be the number of cans Pozarevac collects, and whether the library at the Children’s Ward ends up opening. That is the only part of the program that is not performed on stage.