Zlatibor Sports Film Festival Comes Full Circle
The 15th Zlatibor International Sports Film Festival runs from August 20 to 23 and opens with the documentary about Dejan Rambo Petkovic, the same film that started it all fifteen years ago.
Fifteen years ago, at the first edition of the International Sports Film Festival, audiences at the Cultural Center in Zlatibor watched the documentary “O Gringo,” a film about Dejan Rambo Petkovic. This August, at the fifteenth edition, that same film opens the festival again, and the man it portrays will be sitting in the hall as the recipient of a lifetime achievement award. Few festivals get to mark an anniversary this literally, without a single retrospective montage.
The 15th International Sports Film Festival runs in Zlatibor from August 20 to 23, at the Cultural Center, with free admission, under the slogan “A Tradition That Celebrates the Perseverance of Champions.” The program was unveiled at a press conference at the Yugoslav Film Archive, a fairly clear signal from a festival that spends four days on a mountain about where it actually sees itself: not in the sports pages, but in film.
Who Selected the Films, and Who Will Judge Them
More than 100 films from 30 countries were submitted for this year’s edition, and selector Ognjen Rakcevic, associate professor at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, chose thirty works for the competition and accompanying programs. That works out to roughly one in three, a genuine selection rather than a schedule filled out for its own sake.
The prizes will be decided by an international jury:
- director Darko Bajic
- journalist Aleksandar Avramovic
- dramaturge Metka Dedakovic, a former editor at RTV Slovenija
The lineup is carefully balanced between a director’s sensibility, a journalist’s reading of sport and a dramaturge’s eye, and for a festival of this kind that matters more than it sounds. Sports documentaries slide easily into promotional material for a club or federation, so the jury needs to be able to tell a manufactured emotion from an actual dramatic arc.
Two Premieres: Boskov and Eighty Years of Partizan
The film “Vujke, jedan jedini,” dedicated to coach Vujadin Boskov, will have its festival premiere. It was produced by Medijska mreža and directed by Gradimir Brankovic. Boskov is one of the rare figures in Serbian sport whose public speech was itself a kind of authorship, which makes the source material for a film both richer and riskier, since it can easily collapse into a string of anecdotes.
The documentary “Na svetu ništa lepše ne može da postoji” is also premiering, made to mark eighty years of the Yugoslav Sports Society Partizan, produced by Subplot Media and directed by Filip Colovic. The film combines archival footage, staged sequences and testimony from athletes, a format that has become the standard approach to anniversary documentaries across the post-Yugoslav region in recent years.
An Award That Arrives at the Wrong Address
Starting this year, the festival is introducing a prize for best sports podcast, a move that acknowledges what audiences already know: sports stories today get listened to as much as they get watched. The first laureate is journalist Edin Avdic, for the podcast “X&O’s CHAT,” and following his sudden death the award will be presented to his family. The new category is opening with a posthumous honor, which was never the intention of anyone who created it.
Lifetime achievement awards and honors for contribution to sport and film will also be presented at the opening ceremony. According to festival director Olivera Nikitovic, the recipients are:
- footballers Dejan Rambo Petkovic and Slavka Kanjevac
- table tennis player Branka Batinic
- shooter Goran Maksimovic
- athlete Dane Korica
- sports journalist Stevan Kovacevic
Special recognitions go to the Yugoslav Sports Society Partizan for eighty years of existence, and to the Jedinstvo table tennis club from Uzice, for its promotion to the top division.
What Zlatibor Gains by Joining FICTS
The festival belongs to the International Federation of Cinema, Television and Sport, FICTS, an organization recognized by the International Olympic Committee, and is part of the World FICTS Challenge circuit. Winning films from Zlatibor thereby earn a place at the world final in Milan. That kind of institutional link usually gets buried in the last paragraph of a press release, yet it is the actual reason filmmakers from thirty countries send their work to a mountain town in western Serbia in the first place.
What remains is what makes an anniversary an anniversary. A program that opens with the film that started it all, with that film’s own protagonist sitting in the audience, is more than a neatly arranged symmetry. It is also a test: fifteen years on, this is a chance to see how well a documentary from 2010 has held up, and how much the festival that first screened it has grown in the meantime.
