Izlet Named Serbia's Entry for 99th Oscars
The selection committee unanimously chose Nenad Pavlovic's film as Serbia's Oscar entry, the story of a young man fleeing a totalitarian society and personal tragedy down a river.
A young man named Toma stands alone on a riverbank with everything behind him: a city that suffocates him, a family he has lost, a system that has no patience for an artist who only wants to create. That image, a man facing the water and facing his own uncertainty, is now officially part of the race for the world’s biggest film prize. Izlet (Serbian for “The Outing”), directed by Nenad Pavlovic, was chosen today, September 10, as Serbia’s candidate for the 99th Academy Awards in the Best International Feature Film category.
The decision, according to the producers, was made unanimously by the selection committee tasked with choosing Serbia’s Oscar candidate. Izlet will represent Serbia in a race whose next step is already on the calendar: nominations for the 99th Academy Awards will be announced on January 21, 2027, with the ceremony set for March 14, 2027, at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. The film still has a long qualifying process ahead of it, but making the national selection is already confirmation that Pavlovic’s work has been recognized as the one that should represent Serbia.
Who Is Nenad Pavlovic
Izlet is Nenad Pavlovic’s second feature film, following the 2022 thriller Trag Divljaci. It was produced by the Belgrade based company Digimedia, with Predrag Popovic and Milos Djukelic as producers. The screenplay was written by Jovan Popovic, and that is where the story stops being just a story about one director’s project and becomes something with more layers.
Why Does the Popovic and Pavlovic Legacy Matter Here?
The source material is the 1957 novel of the same name by Mica Popovic, a man who was a painter, film director and writer all at once, and one of the names without whom postwar Serbian art cannot be told. The screenplay is written by his son, Jovan Popovic. The film’s director, Nenad Pavlovic, is the son of Zivojin Pavlovic, one of the most important figures of the Black Wave in Yugoslav cinema. Once that is known, the film’s authorial intent stops being just a line from a press release: the crew was deliberately invoking, through the language of film, three eras of Serbian art, literary zenithism, the painting movement Medijala and the cinematic Black Wave, and doing so through the descendants of the people who built those eras. This is not a tribute out of respect for late fathers. It is an attempt to carry the legacy forward with the hands of someone who inherited it at home before he ever studied it at film school.
In Izlet, the young artist Toma sets off on a journey down a river, fleeing a totalitarian society and a personal tragedy that struck his family, and along the way confronts obstacles he has to overcome. Pavlovic himself explained the choice of subject more clearly than any synopsis could:
This is a story about the inner turmoil unfolding in the mind of a young man devoted to artistic creation but lost in everyday life. Through a deeply existentialist lens, the film explores the fragile balance between isolation and belonging, freedom and duty, offering a poetic reflection on what it means to create, to suffer and to live.
It is a line that could just as easily describe the family position Pavlovic occupies as an author: he inherited a name, but not a ready answer to what it means to create under that name.
The cast includes Stefan Vukic, Jovo Maksic, Nenad Herakovic, Radoslav Rale Milenkovic, Denis Muric, Radoje Cupic, Milena Pavlovic, Milena Radulovic, Milica Trifunovic, Marija Opsenica and Elizabeta Djorevska, alongside two acting veterans, Dragan Bjelogrlic and Predrag Miki Manojlovic, whose presence in the cast carries weight on its own. Another notable detail of the casting is the return of Sasa Ali to film after a twenty year absence. Older viewers remember him from Do Koske and Apsolutnih Sto, and this marks one of his first roles in two decades.
What the selection of Izlet says about Serbia’s Oscar campaign this year is not simply that the committee put an artistically demanding title ahead of something more widely watched. It also shows that the committee recognized a story that does not try to be universal by the standards of a Los Angeles jury, but is deeply personal, familial and authorial, and precisely because of that has something to say even to viewers who know nothing about zenithism or the Black Wave. Whether that story reaches the January shortlist will only be known on January 21, 2027. Until then, Izlet carries the flag alone.
