Nis Film Festival Closes Tonight With Awards

When the name of the actor of the evening was read out on the Summer Stage in Nis Fortress on Friday night, the stands were packed to the last seat, and Dimitrije Mita Ilic walked out to face the audience that had picked him itself. He won the title for his role in “Christmas Adventure,” about a young ballet dancer from North Macedonia who meets his fiancee’s family in Zlatibor, and that is the last piece of news the festival carries into tonight, Sunday, August 30, 2026, when it closes its sixth and final day.

This year’s edition of the International Film Festival in Nis ran for six days and offered 26 films, 12 of them premieres, split between the Summer Stage in the Fortress and the Vilin Grad cinema. The City of Nis and the Ministry of Culture serve as patrons, the Nis Cultural Center is the organizer, and Telekom Srbija is the general sponsor.

For this edition the festival also introduced a lifetime achievement acting award named “Danilo Bata Stojkovic,” alongside the Grand Prix “Golden Naisus,” the “Constantine’s Seal” and the “Golden Helena,” plus special recognitions for lead, supporting and young actors and actresses. All of it is handed out tonight at 10 p.m. on the Summer Stage, the moment the spotlights fade on the last premiere of the day.

Friday as a Dress Rehearsal for the Finale

Friday was the day the competition program was rounded out. The Summer Stage hosted the premieres of “Duplicate,” directed by Marko Glusic, and the comedy “Sports Heart,” directed by Milan Karadzic from a script by Djordje Milosavljevic. The full “Duplicate” team took a bow before the Nis audience alongside the director: screenwriter, executive producer and actor Boris Lukman, executive producer and actor Djordje Kreca, executive producer and actor Petar Arsic, and actors Anastasija Knezevic and Dimitrije Mita Ilic. The children’s part of that evening’s program featured performances by “Zumba Kids,” while soloists from the Belgrade Opera, Ljubica Vranes and Dragoljub Bajic, performed the best-known melodies of Serbian and world cinema right on King Milan Square, as part of the “Our Movie Night” program.

The title of actor of the evening, though, did not go to anyone from that premiere. It was awarded retroactively, for a role from Thursday, when “Christmas Adventure” had its gala premiere on the same stage. Ilic arrived at the festival as part of a team that already carried two awards: the audience award for best film at the 50th Film Script Festival in Vrnjacka Banja, and the title of best international feature at the MEI International Film Festival in India, in a field of more than 1,200 submitted works. With those two awards already in hand coming into Nis, the audience’s votes added a third, a rare run for a single festival title.

The actor himself was brief after the announcement.

“I’m glad I got that award for actor of the evening. It’s an award given by the audience, and I think they were very well qualified to judge. As far as I’m concerned, they were very well qualified. Christmas is somehow… I think in every part of Serbia it’s experienced in a specific way. It’s the same here. It was something close to my own makeup, so to speak. I found it appealing and challenging, and it was very interesting for me to play. And on the shoot itself it very quickly became clear that the team is truly fantastic, excellent. I said at the time, if even a part of the atmosphere we have on set while we’re making the film comes through on screen, it will be a direct hit. I think a good deal of it came through, so the audience is responding well, and I think we managed to pull that off.”

Ilic said this right after the announcement in Nis, on the same stage where the rest of the awards are being handed out tonight.

What’s on Tonight’s Schedule?

The last day is the shortest of all six, but also the most packed. At 6 p.m. the Vilin Grad cinema screens “Mother of Pearl and Fog” from the competition program, the last title still in the running for an award. The audience then moves to the Fortress: at 8 p.m. the Festival Symphony Orchestra performs a program of film music, at 8:30 p.m. comes the premiere of “Motka,” and at 10 p.m. the closing ceremony begins with the presentation of all the festival’s awards.

For a festival that pushed through 26 titles in six days, twelve of them premieres, tonight’s closing is not a formality but the one moment when two different verdicts on the same material collide. The jury picks who takes home the “Golden Naisus,” while the audience already made its own pick on Thursday, choosing Ilic. Whether those two lists match up will be known after 10 p.m. on the Summer Stage in Nis Fortress.