Darko Peric Opens Iron Gate Film Festival in Kladovo

Late summer on the Djerdap stretch of the Danube rarely turns a fortress into a screen and a projector, but on Wednesday evening, August 26, that is exactly what happened at Fetislam. The renovated fortress on the riverbank, usually a stop for history tours and day trippers, gave up its plateau that evening to a summer stage, rows of chairs, and an audience that had come to watch something Kladovo had never hosted before: the official opening of its own international film festival.

This was the first official edition of the Iron Gate International Film Festival (IGIFF), preceded by a pilot run in 2025 that served as a trial before organizers decided to push the event up to a regional and international scale. Sources do not fully agree on how long the program lasts. The Kladovo municipal website and Kurir put it at August 26 through 29, Danas writes that it actually began on August 25, and Nova.rs, which reported on the opening a day later, says the film selection still had audiences waiting through August 29. Whichever version holds until the final day, one thing is clear: the opening itself at Fetislam took place on the evening of August 26, not the 27th, as a later report on it might suggest.

The festival was opened by its founder, actor Darko Peric, who was born in Kladovo. To audiences beyond the region he is known above all as Helsinki from La Casa de Papel (Money Heist), but for this story his other role matters more: ambassador and driving force behind an event he envisioned as connecting filmmakers from different backgrounds the way the Danube connects the countries it flows through. The opening drew festival guests, figures from film and cultural life, institutions, media, and the local community, and the program began with the domestic film “For Today, That’s Enough” (Za danas toliko), directed by Marko Djordjevic, who spoke to the audience after the screening about how the film came together and the ideas behind it.

The festival’s structure shows it is more than a one-night event. The program runs across two locations: daytime screenings and accompanying content are held at the Kladovo Cultural Center, while the evening program belongs to the Fetislam summer stage itself, where the walls and the view of the river create a backdrop no courtyard cinema in a larger city could match. The selection includes seven films: “White Valley, Black Rooster” by Aleks Galan, “Thorn” by Daniel Poler, “Wind, Talk to Me” by Stefan Djordjevic, “And God Created a Tavern Singer” by Jovan Zivanovic, “Greta and the Real Fairy Tales” by Berardo Carboni, and “Yugo Florida” by Vladimir Tagic, alongside works arriving from Serbia, Spain, Panama, and Italy. Several of these films are having their Serbian premiere in Kladovo, putting the small municipality on the border with Romania and Bulgaria, at least for a few days, in the same sentence as festivals with far bigger budgets.

Going by the announced lineup, the guest list runs longer than a typical Kladovo August would suggest. Alongside Marko Djordjevic, the program features directors Stefan Djordjevic, Berardo Carboni, and Stevan Li Mraovic, and among the guests is Latin American actor Aron Diaz Spencer, a name that likely means little to regional audiences but gives the festival the kind of international signature that smaller events usually have to fake. Running alongside the screenings is IGIFF LAB, a workshop for young people interested in filmmaking, and it is that segment that will ultimately decide whether the festival stays a one-off attraction or becomes the start of something lasting. An actor or a guest shows up once, for a single evening, but the generation that goes through the workshop stays on after the festival days are over.

What makes IGIFF interesting is not its size. Seven films and a few festival days cannot compete with Sarajevo or Motovun. It is the position that counts. Until now, Kladovo had no place on the film map beyond the Djerdap Dam and the border crossing, and a festival like this, if it survives a second and third year, becomes a reason to travel there in August, not along the river but because of the river and what is now happening on it. Whether Fetislam will, in a few years, be mentioned in the same breath as Kustendorf or Palic remains an open question. For now, only the beginning is certain, and it is convincing enough to justify a sequel.