Bitef 2026: Merchant of Venice Opens September 13
Belgrade's festival runs September 13 to 20 with seven productions from six countries, opening with KPGT's Merchant of Venice, set in Venice ahead of the 1938 racial laws.
Venice, 1938. The fascist regime’s racial laws have just stripped Jews of citizenship, the right to hold public office and the right to marry outside their faith, all in the name of a homogeneity the regime cast as national defense. Into that Venice, at that precise historical moment, KPGT sets Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, and with that choice opens the 59th Bitef. This is not a costume exercise, nor a relocation of the plot for effect: the production, according to the announcement, speaks not only to history but to the mechanism by which an enemy is manufactured, step by step, first through law and then through everyday life.
The festival runs in Belgrade from September 13 to 20, under the slogan Dare to Know. The selection was put together by Spasoje Z. Milovanovic, and, by his own account, under circumstances in which the very holding of Bitef has become a subject of public and political scrutiny. He did not start from a predetermined theme or aesthetic, but from something less comfortable: the productions he chose share a refusal to trade the world’s complexity for a simple answer or a ready-made explanation. That much is clear from the roster of countries in this year’s selection alone, rarely so varied.
Seven productions, six countries
The main program comprises seven productions from Bulgaria, Moldova, Georgia, Turkey, Tunisia and Serbia, while Russia this year sits outside the main program, in the Accompanying Program. After The Merchant of Venice, directed by Strahinja Padezanin, comes the Bulgarian Albion, by British playwright Mike Bartlett, directed by Zafir Radzhab and produced by the Nikolay Binev Youth Theatre in Sofia. Its theme, according to the announcement, is the longing to bring back what is gone, and the moment that longing grows from private memory into a broader social need, a subject that needs little further explanation here.
Moldova arrives with a documentary approach: Chisinau at Night, by Mihai Fusu, who both wrote and directed it, produced by Chisinau’s Teatrul Fara Nume (Theatre Without a Name), built from the real stories of the city’s residents: taxi drivers, receptionists, dancers, former addicts. In work like this the line between document and theater keeps shifting, and the city stops being a backdrop: it becomes a character with many faces, a society that has no single version of itself. Georgia’s Stalker, by Avtandil Varsimashvili, produced by Tbilisi’s Liberty Theatre, starts from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film but does not illustrate it, using it instead as a starting point for reflecting on faith, doubt and the limits of human knowledge, at a time when the line between truth and lies is only getting harder to draw.
The domestic entry is Dejan Dukovski’s Black Gold, directed by Oliver Frljic and performed by the ensemble of the Belgrade Drama Theatre, a production that does not leave politics out on the street and in parliament but brings it to the kitchen table, into what is said and what is deliberately left unsaid. Turkey is represented by Sophocles’ Antigone, directed by Hakan Alkan and produced by Karma Sahne of Samsun, an old conflict between the individual and the law that here takes on a thoroughly contemporary edge. Tunisia sends The Runaways, by Vafa Tabubi, produced by the National Theatre of Tunisia, a story about waiting that stops being the empty space between two events and becomes an event in its own right, a prison of its own kind. Russia, as announced, appears in the Accompanying Program, with Russian Blues, by Sofia Gorlova and Anton Shmakov.
When and where
The productions play across six venues: Atelje 212, the National Theatre, Bitef Theatre, Belgrade Drama Theatre, Terazije Theatre and Yugoslav Drama Theatre. Post-show talks with the authors follow every performance, hosted by Jelena Kajgo and Bojan Munjin, giving audiences who stay behind a chance to hear an answer to a question the production has, by all accounts, only just posed, not resolved.
The festival center and box office are housed at Bitef Theatre, at 1 Mira Trailovic Square. From September 7 to 13 the center is open from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and from September 13 to 20, that is, for the duration of Bitef itself, the hours extend to 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
