Petrovic Launches ARTIS, Dragojevic Slams It as a Sham

On Sunday, September 13, a handful of people gathered at Belgrade’s Youth Center for a meeting that, by the organizers’ own choice, the public was not supposed to see. Invitations circulated only among insiders, no journalists were asked to attend, and the only thing formally agreed that evening was a date for a future meeting, the one at which the association would actually be founded. It sounds like a cautious start. The problem is that, according to Serbia’s Business Registers Agency, the association in question has already existed for two months.

The group is the Association of Radio, Television, Film and Stage Artists, known by its acronym ARTIS, represented by director Milutin Petrovic. In an interview recorded by Sonja Ciric for the weekly Vreme and published on September 15, Petrovic spoke publicly about ARTIS for the first time. A day later Srdjan Dragojevic responded, having found the whole affair familiar for a different reason entirely. The invitation to Sunday’s gathering describes a much needed, broad association that will address the legal status and regulation of everyone working in radio, television, film, theater and other stage professions, with particular attention to what it calls overlooked creators such as film and television editors, sound designers, directors of photography, costume designers and set designers. Two concrete priorities are listed: competitions run by the Film Center Serbia, and dialogue with state institutions on future legislation.

Petrovic, who previously left the Serbian Film Artists Association together with Predrag Gaga Antonijevic, explains the need for a new body by pointing out that no existing association covers all of those professions at once. Asked which members he is actually counting on, given that everyone working in film and theater already belongs to some association, his answer is simple, and in its simplicity, fairly telling: “We will offer benefits that those other associations might not have.”

The paperwork complicates that simplicity further. Records from the APR’s Register of Associations show that ARTIS was filed on July 16, with its registered seat in Belgrade’s Zvezdara district, but that the agency rejected the registration application in early August. The reasoning was not political or substantive, it was purely procedural: according to the ruling, the founding act was adopted on July 13, three days before the founding assembly held on July 16, something Article 14 of the Registration Procedure Act simply does not allow. In other words, on paper the association existed before it was legally allowed to exist. A repeat assembly is now being announced, three weeks after the conversation with Vreme, and Petrovic did not answer when asked whether that future assembly will be the first and only one or simply a correction of the earlier one.

That procedural detail actually tells us the most about the association itself. A founding act signed before the assembly that supposedly “adopted” it is not necessarily malicious fraud, it looks more like haste, a body put together faster than the bureaucracy allows, only for the bureaucracy, unlike colleagues in the profession, to refuse to forgive the shortcut. In a scene where the old and numerous Serbian Film Artists Association already counts more than 600 members, a new association founded in secret and then corrected inevitably reads as a gesture of distrust toward the profession’s existing institutions, even if that was never the intention.

That is exactly where Dragojevic enters the story, having learned about ARTIS only from Vreme rather than from colleagues who, by their own admission, are founding it. His comment needs no further interpretation, since it interprets itself: “It looks like a continuation of a tradition: they have sham festivals, so why not have a sham association too.” At this point in Serbian public discourse, the term he reached for carries a very specific meaning, a gathering organized from the top down, for the sake of appearances rather than out of any real need, and Dragojevic pinpointed it as the shortest possible description of what he had just read. He adds, almost in passing, an expiration date: “It will survive until October 25.”

Whether ARTIS actually survives that date, or any date, will be tracked in the same section that follows the fate of every new film association anyway, the section where good intentions are measured not by invitations but by whether an institution can withstand its own founding act. For now, ARTIS has a name, a registered seat in Zvezdara and one representative promising benefits that, he says, no one else offers. What it does not yet have is a properly held founding assembly.