March Festival Opens Tonight With 26 Premieres
The combined 72nd and 73rd edition of Belgrade's documentary and short film festival opens tonight at Dom Omladine with Tamara Kotevska's The Tale of Silyan and runs through September 27.
A man finds a white stork that can’t fly on an abandoned garbage dump. The village behind him is nearly empty, its families gone abroad for work, and he stays to care for the bird while his own life falls apart the same way the community around him is falling apart. That scene opens Tamara Kotevska’s The Tale of Silyan, and with it, tonight at 7 p.m. in the main hall of Belgrade’s Dom Omladine, the 72nd/73rd March Festival begins.
It’s the Serbian premiere of a film that had its world premiere in Venice in 2025 and its North American premiere in Toronto. The Tale of Silyan (North Macedonia, United States, United Kingdom, 2025, 81 minutes) follows farmer Nikola, who is left to face the fallout of new government policies and his inability to sell either his crops or his land after his family leaves for Germany. In the stork he finds at the dump, the film builds a mirror for a man whose natural course of life has been interrupted, while the emptying village becomes the backdrop for a story about migration, climate change, and what remains once a community leaves.
Why This Year’s Festival Is a Combined Edition
The March Festival, the oldest event in Belgrade dedicated to documentary and short film, arrives this year as a combined 72nd/73rd edition. The program brings together domestic and international films from two years of competitive selection, though the awards remain separate: prizes are given for the 72nd edition and, separately, for the 73rd. The lineup includes 26 premieres in total, world, regional, Serbian and Belgrade premieres, spread across competition categories for documentaries under and over 50 minutes, experimental film and video art, animation, short fiction, and the international short film competition. The festival runs seven days, through September 27, and tickets at 500 dinars are available at the Dom Omladine box office, through the eFinity network, and online.
The director opening this edition is no stranger to major festivals. Tamara Kotevska co-directed Honeyland with Ljubomir Stefanov, a documentary that won three awards at Sundance in 2019, including the Grand Jury Prize for best world documentary, and went on to earn two Oscar nominations, for best documentary feature and best international feature. The Tale of Silyan is her next step in the same direction, toward themes she had only hinted at before: the relationship between people and nature, seen through the fate of a vanishing community.
What links the opening film to the festival’s program as a whole is an interest in where personal loss ends and collective loss begins. Nikola’s story isn’t just about one man and one bird, but about a village that, like many others in the region, is emptying out as the young leave and the old stay behind to look after what no longer has anyone to pass it on to. That theme runs, in different registers, through the rest of the selection, which, according to the organizers, also includes films that revisit historical events and forgotten figures, along with works that treat everyday life with humor.
The festival, founded more than seven decades ago, is also getting a vote of institutional confidence this year from its own leadership. Nikola Rajicic, president of the March Festival board, said in a statement marking the opening:
“At a time that presents us with so many challenges, we welcome another edition of the March Festival with particular pleasure and pride.”
Rajicic added that the festival is not just a continuation of one event but an obligation to film history itself:
“Preserving the festival isn’t just a matter of continuing one event. It’s our responsibility to film history, to the filmmakers creating today, and to future generations.”
Vanja Vulevic, acting director of Dom Omladine Beograda, the institution that organizes and produces the festival, said something similar:
“As a standing cultural event of the City of Belgrade, the March Festival has spent decades contributing to the development and promotion of documentary and short film.”
Behind those words is a practical detail: the City of Belgrade is the festival’s main sponsor, alongside Serbia’s Ministry of Culture and the Film Center Serbia, which makes the combined edition as much a question of continued funding for one of Europe’s oldest film showcases as it is a question of programming.
For audiences who love documentary film, tonight’s opening offers something rare: a chance to see a film that has already played Venice and Toronto before it reaches regular theatrical release, if it ever does. For everyone else, the seven days that follow bring 26 premieres and a selection that, judging by its announced themes, doesn’t shy away from uncomfortable questions about who stays and who leaves once a community starts to empty out.
