Smederevo: A Hen and Kate Blanchett Vie for Top Prize
The ninth Danube Film Fest is in its final stretch in Smederevo Fortress, where eight titles, from a hen's fable to a Kate Blanchett film, compete for the Danube Barge award until Wednesday.
These days, the Small Town inside Smederevo Fortress is a theater playing at being a cinema. A screen goes up between the ramparts, the audience sits where guided tours and summer concerts usually happen, and the lineup is chosen not by a multiplex but by the selection team of a provincial festival that has, for the ninth year running, decided to measure itself against Toronto and the Berlinale. Through Wednesday evening, that setting hosts the competition program of the ninth Danube Film Fest: eight feature films fighting for the Danube Barge award.
The festival is organized by the Smederevo Center for Culture under the city’s patronage and runs from August 21 to 26. Six days, 40 films, four program sections and four venues: alongside the Small Town, screenings also take place at Danube Park, the square by Karadjordje’s Mulberry, and the Center for Culture’s hall. It opened on Friday, August 21, with a screening of director Tanja Brzakovic’s film House, starring Miralem Zubcevic, David Stancu and Jelena Bosanac. The competition program, the one carrying the biggest stakes, is reserved exclusively for the fortress walls.
What Sets This Year’s Competition Lineup Apart
The eight competition titles come from very different lineages, and that very difference is what makes the program read as a whole rather than a random assortment. Hen, by Hungarian director Gyorgy Palfi, is a Greek, German and Hungarian coproduction told from the point of view of a hen that ends up at a rundown restaurant on the Greek coast and watches the people around it from there; the film had its world premiere in Toronto, where it won a special jury mention in the Platform program. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Euphoria by Julian Rosefeldt, with Kate Blanchett in one of the lead roles, an experimentally staged piece about contemporary society’s relationship with capitalism and consumption. A fable told through an animal’s eyes and a star driven dissection of money share the same lineup and the same prize, which is itself a statement about how the selectors read a “film about the Danube region”: generously, across genres and production scales, not by formula.
A third angle on the same story is Rose by Markus Schleinzer, a black and white historical drama set in the seventeenth century, in which Sandra Huller plays a woman who disguises herself as a man to claim a place in a world that will not give her one. The film had its world premiere in the main competition of the Berlinale, where Huller won the Silver Bear for Best Actress, and its presence in Smederevo is the clearest sign that the festival picks titles by ambition rather than availability. Also in competition are I’m Leaving in June by Katarina Rivilis, Made in EU by Stefan Komandarev, Nina Rose by Genevieve Dulude De Celles, The Gentle Monster by Marie Kreutzer, and The Sleeping Adventure by Valeska Grisebach: eight different entry points into the same theme of Danubian identity, from personal to collective history.
Who Is Judging, and What Comes Before Wednesday
The winner will be picked by a three member jury: art historian and film critic Ana Filipovic, French Serbian actress Sara Novak, and director and producer Igor Toholj. Their task is not an easy one, precisely because the program offers no common denominator beyond setting and the filmmakers’ geography, so the judging necessarily comes down to which film made the best use of its own form rather than which one most resembles what a “festival film” is expected to look like.
The closing ceremony is set for Wednesday, August 26, at 8 p.m., again in the Small Town. That is when the Danube Barge award is handed out, and the evening continues with “Film Rhapsody,” a film music concert by accordionist Dusan Sekulic with his band and the Becej Town Choir, followed by a screening of Emir Kusturica’s Do You Remember Dolly Bell. Admission to the closing ceremony is free, while tickets for the rest of the program are sold through the sdkultura.rs website and on site in front of the fortress.
What makes this year’s selection worth watching is not the budget size of any single title, but the decision to judge a fable about a hen and a film with a Hollywood star by the same rules, in the same courtyard. That is a bet only festivals that do not need one big name to fill the seats can afford to make, and going by this lineup, the ninth Danube Film Fest is ready to see it through to the end.
