Zemun Fest: Cannes on the Main Square, Free Admission
From August 19 to 23, the open air Zemun Fest screens five titles from Cannes and Berlinale on the Main Square. The films are free, tickets are sold only for the concert nights.
The film that opened this year’s 79th Cannes Film Festival, where tickets are not sold to the general public, gets a screening on Wednesday, August 19 at 8 PM, on the Main Square in Zemun, open to anyone who arrives before the seats fill up. It is the French title “Electric Kiss” by director Pierre Salvadori, a France-Belgium coproduction, and it opens the five day program announced by the Sky Music house.
Zemun Fest runs from August 19 to 23 and spreads across four locations: the Main Square, the Zemun Quay, Magistratski Square and Zemun Park. The split is straightforward. Films and daytime workshops are free, tickets are sold only for the concert evenings, and prices, according to the published schedule, run from 2,000 to 8,000 dinars a day.
What’s on after the opening night
The rest of the Main Square screenings start at 8:30 PM. On Thursday, August 20, the lineup includes the documentary “The Match”, by Argentine filmmakers Santiago Franco and Juan Cabral, previously shown in Cannes and Karlovy Vary, about the Argentina-England game at the 1986 World Cup. For audiences who only know that match secondhand, from footage and from stories, it is as close as cinema gets to an event whose ending is already known and that still gets watched to the final minute.
On Friday, August 21, the program turns to “Rose”, a Berlinale title directed by Markus Schleinzer, a Germany-Austria coproduction for which Sandra Hüller won the Silver Bear for best performance. The statement announcing the program draws its own comparison with a domestic classic:
Friday is reserved for the Berlinale sensation, the film “Rose,” for which Sandra Hüller won the Silver Bear for best performance, a story that reminds many viewers of the cult Serbian film “Virdzina.”
The comparison to Srdjan Karanovic’s film is not a marketing flourish, since both stories turn on the same premise, a woman living under a male identity, so audiences drawn by Sandra Hüller get a reason to revisit one of our older titles too.
Saturday, August 22, is set aside for the family film “Hajduk u Beogradu” (an outlaw tale set in Belgrade), directed by Milan Todorovic and based on the novel by Gradimir Stojkovic. Slotting a domestic children’s title between three festival films is a decision about the audience, not the canon: it is the night families who otherwise skip the 8:30 PM screenings show up on the Main Square. The program closes on Sunday, August 23, with the French comedy “Crescendo,” the new film by Agnès Jaoui, also from the Cannes selection.
Short films get their own stage
From August 20 to 23, also starting at 8:30 PM, Magistratski Square hosts an international competitive program for young filmmakers, the short film competition. It is the part of announcements like this one that usually goes unnoticed, and it is the only one where anything is actually being judged. Short film production in Serbia has output but no venue of its own, so the square, however improvised that sounds, becomes one of the few places where this kind of film reaches an audience that did not choose it in advance.
Music comes with a ticket, except for one night
The concert program is held on the Zemun Quay and does carry an admission fee. The lineup includes Baby Lasagna, Devito, 2soma, Edo Maajka, Nipplepeople, Who See, Regina, Nele Karajlic and Cotton Pickers, split across the evenings as follows:
- Thursday, August 20: Deca iz vode at 9:30 PM, Partibrejkers at 10:30 PM
- Friday, August 21: Regina at 8 PM, Nipplepeople at 9:30 PM, Devito at 10:30 PM
- Saturday, August 22: Who See at 8 PM, Edo Maajka at 9:30 PM, Nele Karajlic at 10:30 PM
- Sunday, August 23: Cotton Pickers at 8 PM, Baby Lasagna at 9:30 PM, 2soma at 10:30 PM
Admission to the August 20 concert night is free, when Partibrejkers take the stage alongside the Deca iz vode tribute act and the winners of Zemunsko prolece.
What sets this year’s Zemun Fest apart from the summer programs that amount to little more than stages and stands is that its film lineup is built like a proper repertoire, not filler for empty slots. Five nights, five titles, three major festivals and one domestic family film, all without a ticket. If that math works out with audiences, the Main Square will have done in five days what distribution does not manage across an entire season.
