FEST 2026: Returns to Sava Centar, Zafranovic Opens It

For six years, the Blue Hall of Sava Centar has not hosted a single festival screening. In the meantime, screenings scattered across the city, audiences grew used to tracking FEST down at different addresses, and Belgrade’s largest film hall stood quiet. That changes on October 2, and the choice of film picked to break the silence is no accident: the 53rd International Film Festival FEST is returning to Sava Centar with the premiere of a work that confronts one of the hardest chapters in the region’s history.

Organizers say the festival will run from October 2 to 11, 2026, with screenings held not only at Sava Centar but also across other cinema halls in Belgrade. At the opening in the Blue Hall, FEST audiences will get the premiere of “Golden Cut 42 (Children of Kozara),” the latest work from Croatian director Lordan Zafranovic.

Produced by TS Media, the film is based on a screenplay Zafranovic wrote with Arsen Diklic back in 1986, and it deals with the killing of children at the Jasenovac camp in 1942. Weaving together the perspectives of victims and perpetrators, the story follows the fate of Serbs, Jews, Roma and Croatian anti-fascists murdered by eight Ustasha executioners, one of whom briefly rebels, only to remain a victim of the evil he serves.

Zafranovic, born in 1944, ranks among the most significant directors to come out of the former Yugoslavia and recently marked sixty years in the industry. He spent his childhood in exile, with his mother and older brother, in El Shatt on the Sinai peninsula, and graduated in film directing in 1971 from FAMU in Prague, in the class of Elmar Klos. His best known feature, “Occupation in 26 Pictures,” screened in the main competition at Cannes in 1979, and he has been counted among the great masters of Yugoslav cinema ever since. His filmography runs to roughly eighty titles.

Handing him the opening slot is not the first mark of attention FEST has shown this director. Zafranovic received the “Belgrade Winner” award at the 51st FEST for his contribution to film art, and accepting it, he said:

“This festival is one great celebration of film, and that is why our responsibility as creators is enormous. That is why we make films, for you, our audience, who have never stopped being our audience. That is why this award is dear to me, and I hope it is not the last.”

At the time, he added that he hoped to return to FEST with a new film. That is exactly what is happening now, two years later, in the very hall that gave him the award.

The choice of subject is no side note in the context of Zafranovic’s body of work either. He has examined the anatomy of Ustasha crimes before, and “Golden Cut 42” continues that work without flinching from its hardest images, judging by the synopsis organizers have released. That is also why the sets were built across several locations in Serbia, to recreate the summer of 1942 as faithfully as possible: the production design is credited to Milenko Jeremic, who already worked with Zafranovic on “Occupation in 26 Pictures.” The cast and crew include more than 100 actors and over 60 film professionals from across the region, which, at least in scale, places the project among the more ambitious regional productions of recent years.

For the festival itself, the return to Sava Centar is as much a logistical call as a symbolic one. For decades the Blue Hall was synonymous with FEST, the place where films played in large format before a packed house, and bringing it back into play after six years restores a piece of identity that had, in the meantime, been scattered across the city. Whether the opening lives up to the weight it carries will be settled by the screening itself on October 2, but the choice of film already signals that this time FEST is not avoiding that weight. It is putting it on the biggest stage it has.