Nis Film Festival Opens on Generators Without Power

A generator hummed somewhere behind the stage as Tanja Boskovic, arm in arm with Petar Bencin, president of the Film Actors’ Association of Serbia, stepped onto the red carpet in front of the Amphitheater on the Nisava riverbank. The audience stood under umbrellas, since rain arrived that evening on top of the power outage, and met her with applause. Of all the ways a film festival could open, one built around a generator as an accidental stage prop was hardly the plan, but it turned into the kind of opening people remember.

The festival began last night, August 29, at 8 p.m., and runs through September 3. Vreme refers to it in its coverage as the Nis Film Festival, while Nova and Danas also note the official slogan under which the Association runs it, “More Than Acting.” The program includes twenty one titles, four of them premieres, and organizers expect more than one hundred twenty actors to attend before the event closes. Screenings take place both on the Amphitheater’s open-air stage and at the Cine Grand cinema in the Delta shopping center.

Why the festival is running on generators

The Association filed its request to connect to the power grid with the Nis branch of Elektrodistribucija well in advance. No response ever came, and when it was time to hook up the equipment, no technician showed up either. According to RTV Belle Amie, the decision that there would be no power arrived less than twenty four hours before the opening itself. Organizers responded the only way they could: they rented enough generators and ran the program exactly as announced.

This year’s venue itself marks a break from tradition. The Nis Film Encounters, the root event behind this actors’ festival, carries sixty years of history dating to 1965 and had been held for decades at the Summer Stage. The city offered the Association a different venue this year, so the program moved to the Nisava riverbank. That same evening, on the other side of town, the International Film Festival was also underway, backed by the City of Nis and the Ministry of Culture and run by the Nis Cultural Center. For the first time in their history, the city festival and the actors’ festival were not one story but two running in parallel.

The high point of the evening was the Pavle Vuisic lifetime achievement award, presented to this year’s winner, Tanja Boskovic, by a jury made up of Anica Dobra, Mirjana Karanovic and Svetozar Cvetkovic. Boskovic accepted the award with the same modesty she has been known for over the decades.

“It could have gone without me getting an award. There are plenty of excellent actors who still haven’t received this one.”

She said it from the stage. On the power outage and the rain that trailed the festival that evening, she had just one line, delivered with a laugh and aimed both at the audience and at whoever had denied the festival its power hookup: “You can still watch a film under umbrellas. Bravo to all of you!”

Actress Andjelka Stevic Zugic, who accepted the keys to the city from the jury on behalf of the organizers, added that losing power hadn’t discouraged the festival, nor had the theft of their cameras on top of everything else. She said it with a laugh, but the line captured the tone of the whole evening: an institutional obstacle was treated as a logistical problem, not a reason to give up. That is the difference between a festival that depends on someone’s permission and one that depends on whether the audience wants to show up, and judging by the ovation on the red carpet, the audience in Nis showed up.

Two titles screened on opening night: “Our Father” by Goran Stankovic and “The House,” directed by Tanja Brzakovic. Choosing “Our Father” to open the festival was no accident, given what it can currently offer as a selling point: two days earlier, at the Film Festival in Herceg Novi, the film won five awards, including the Grand Prix, starring Vucic Perovic, Boris Isakovic, Goran Markovic, Jasna Zalica and Dado Cosic. “The House” stars Miralem Zubcevic, David Stancu, Jelena Bosanac and Anica Dobra.

It’s hard to avoid comparing two festivals that, for the first time this year, are running separately: one with institutional backing and a budget, the other with generators and a borrowed carpet. But a cultural policy that cuts off power to one side of the festival story less than a day before opening says nothing about the quality of the program, only about who currently holds the keys to the socket. The Nis Film Festival showed last night that those two things are not the same, and the audience under the umbrellas understood that before the first screening even began.