Gordana Djurdjevic Dimic Wins Mija Aleksic Award
The leading actress of the Serbian National Theatre's Drama company receives the Mija Aleksic, To Be an Actor award for 2026, the only Serbian acting honor chosen solely by its past winners.
When it comes to the Mija Aleksic, To Be an Actor award, there is no jury in the usual sense of the word. Whoever won the honor the year before chooses who will win it next, so the circle of people deciding is the very same circle that was once honored itself. This year, past laureates, among them Vojin Cetkovic, the 2025 winner, picked Gordana Djurdjevic Dimic, leading actress of the Drama company at the Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad, as the new recipient.
The ceremony is scheduled for Thursday, September 24, in the main hall of the Mija Aleksic Cultural Center in Gornji Milanovac, as part of the Mija Aleksic Days, an event dedicated to the memory of one of the greatest actors of the Serbian and Yugoslav stage and screen. This year the event coincides with the twelfth International Film Festival in Gornji Milanovac, running from September 23 to October 4 and organized by the same Cultural Center. The festival opens on Wednesday, September 23, with Sentimental Value by Norwegian director Joachim Trier, the film that won the Grand Prix in the main competition at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. The competitive program is split into three selections: the European feature and documentary program Films for You, chosen by Boban Stefanovic; short films up to 25 minutes, selected by Dejan Dabic; and a program for filmmakers under 19, chosen jointly by Valentina Nadj and Nebojsa Gojkovic.
A career measured in awards
Djurdjevic Dimic graduated from the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, in the class of professor Branko Plesa, and has since built a body of work in theatre, film and television that has brought her nearly every major Serbian acting honor. The Sterija Award for acting achievement, the Nusic Award for lifetime achievement given to a comic actor, the Zanka Stokic and Milivoje Zivanovic honors, the Vuk Award and the October Award of Novi Sad already sit in her biography, and last year she also received the Dobrica Ring, one of the highest honors a Serbian actor can receive for a lifetime body of work. The Mija Aleksic, To Be an Actor award adds to a list that was already long, but it carries something none of the others do: it is chosen exclusively by people from the same profession.
Why does it matter who chooses?
A system in which the winner nominates the next winner is uncommon in Serbian cultural practice, where most awards are handed out by expert juries made up of critics, art historians or representatives of the institutions that established the prize. The award named after Mija Aleksic, established in 2018, has gone the opposite way from the start. Previous winners, Nenad Jezdic, Nebojsa Dugalic, Gordan Kicic, Vesna Trivalic, Olga Odanovic, Branimir Brstina, Zoran Cvijanovic and the aforementioned Cetkovic, form a list that on its own reads like an informal survey of the Serbian acting scene of the past decade, and each of them at some point decided who deserved to enter that circle next.
Such a mechanism makes the award more resistant to fashion and momentary visibility, since colleagues in the craft recognize something that rarely reaches a wider audience: a consistency in the work that is not measured by a single role but by an entire career. That is precisely the reasoning, artistic integrity, professional standing and a genuine relationship to the acting profession, written into the award’s own definition, and it is hard to imagine a jury assembled by administrative formula arriving at the same name as a group of people who know how demanding what Djurdjevic Dimic has been doing for decades in Novi Sad.
The ceremony will also include The Power of Speech, a poetry evening with last year’s laureate Vojin Cetkovic, and Mija Aleksic Days will see the presentation of the monograph Mija Aleksic, published jointly by the Cultural Center and Radio Television of Serbia (RTS), along with the exhibition Faces of the Stage in Milena’s Colors, which symbolically links the artistic worlds of Milena Pavlovic Barili and Mija Aleksic. The film side of the program gets its own curiosity: on September 26 the exhibition Robin Hood in Serbia opens, dedicated to the international production partly filmed in the village of Varnice near Gornji Milanovac, giving audiences a chance to look behind the scenes of a project that involves names from world cinema. The festival and the event are sponsored by the Municipality of Gornji Milanovac, with co-financing from the budget of the Republic of Serbia through the Ministry of Culture.
The award for Djurdjevic Dimic comes at a moment when the festival in Gornji Milanovac, year after year, is building the identity of a place where, alongside its film program, the memory of the actor the center is named after is also kept alive. That duality, a festival that looks forward and an event that looks back, is why this award ceremony never feels like a routine formality, but rather a moment in which the craft holds itself to account.
