FEST 2026: Belgrade Film Festival Returns to Sava Centar

The slogan the Belgrade Festival Center picked for this year’s edition was not built for a marketing campaign. It was lifted straight from the title of a documentary. For FEST’s thirtieth edition, Dinko Tucakovic made “Belgrade and FEST: A Love That Lasts,” and that exact line now sits on the poster for the 53rd edition. Rather than inventing a new pitch, the festival is quoting itself, a gesture that carries both nostalgia and an admission that, despite everything, it hasn’t given up on Belgrade’s love of the cinema hall.

The 53rd International Film Festival FEST will run from October 2 to 11, selector Dragan Jelicic confirmed to “Vreme” after the board approved the proposed lineup. The program holds more than 100 films from 54 countries, some arriving for their world premiere in Belgrade, with a smaller share carried over from last year’s output.

Jelicic was specific about where that lineup comes from:

Some of them will have their world premiere at FEST. The program will include films from this year’s production, and a smaller number are from 2025. Of course, a large number of films come from the biggest festivals, and with awards from those festivals.

The mention of awards is not a throwaway line. It signals an attempt to place FEST back among Europe’s major festivals, judged not just by how many films it screens but by where those films have already been.

FEST has run since 1971, organized by the Belgrade Festival Center (CEBEF), an institution that in its last several editions has been balancing the wish to win back its old audience against a shrunken budget. According to “Vreme,” this year’s edition follows a two year gap, which puts a different spin on the slogan about lasting love: less a victory lap, more a statement of stubbornness.

More telling than the slogan itself is the fact that the opening night and gala program are returning to Sava Centar after six years, while the rest of the selection will screen across nine Belgrade cinemas. For generations of moviegoers, Sava Centar was synonymous with FEST, and going back to that address sends a message: the festival doesn’t want to be a scattered string of screenings around the city, it wants to be a destination again, not just a film to watch.

The choice of opening film points in the same direction. “Zlatni rez 42 (Djeca Kozare)” by Lordan Zafranovic deals with the killing of children at the Jasenovac camp in 1942, from a screenplay Zafranovic wrote with Arsen Diklic back in 1986; the production design recreating that summer was done by Milenko Jeremic. Opening a major city festival with a film about Jasenovac is not a neutral choice. It’s a deliberate move into the territory of historical memory and institutional reckoning, instead of handing the opening slot to an easier, more crowd pleasing title. Zafranovic has, after all, already won at FEST, taking the “Belgrade Winner” award in 2023, so this pick also reads as a nod to continuity in how the festival treats its own canon.

What none of these announcements can yet settle is whether a hundred films from 54 countries will actually deliver the kind of selection FEST was once known for, or whether the number stays just a number. Returning to Sava Centar and opening with a film about Jasenovac are decisions that show real ambition to bring the festival back to itself. Whether the slogan about lasting love describes where things actually stand, or just what the organizers hope for, will come down to the screening schedule once it’s published, and to the audiences in the seats from October 2 to 11.