Bosko Savkovic Wins Third Cannes Award, State Pays Nothing
A documentary about the start and end of World War One in Belgrade has won Bosko Savkovic his third Cannes honor, though he says the state invested almost nothing in the film.
At the Cannes Corporate Media and TV Awards ceremony, most winners walked up to the podium in groups: producers, editors and assistants carrying their television stations’ and national funds’ trophies together. Bosko Savkovic walked up alone. No institution stood behind him, and what awaited him in the “History and Personalities” category was a finalist certificate for the documentary drama “Seven Days That Changed the Century.”
The award was announced on September 25, in a field of nearly a thousand entries from the world’s biggest production houses. This year’s Golden Dolphin went to the Danish film “The Maersk Dynasty,” the Silver Dolphin to the Taiwanese “Chiang Kai-shek Shadow Across the Strait,” and the Grand Prix to the Spanish “A Flamengo Dynasty.” In other words, Savkovic wasn’t competing against amateurs, but against production companies backed by budgets that Serbian cinema hasn’t seen in a long time.
He addressed that gap in resources himself, in a statement to the Beta news agency after the ceremony:
“Especially since the Serbian state invested almost nothing in this film. We all know the situation at the Film Center of Serbia, or with the calls for proposals from the Ministry of Information and Telecommunications. It’s sad to stand alone on the podium while other awards are picked up by whole teams of five to eight people, backed by their countries.”
The only thanks he owed, he added, went to friends from the film industry who, in his words, generously helped him finish the film at all.
This is the third time Savkovic has left Cannes with an award. He won the Golden Dolphin in 2011 for “The Fruits of Winter,” and the Silver Dolphin in 2013 for “After the Bombs.” The continuity is there. Institutional backing has not shown up in any of those three years.
The film itself builds a case that shifts a textbook date: in Savkovic’s version, World War One did not start in Sarajevo but in Belgrade, on July 28, 1914, in an attack whose first casualties on both sides were Dusan Djonovic and Istvan Balohis. Likewise, according to the film, the war did not end with the armistice of November 11, 1918, as is usually marked, but two days later, in the building of the National Museum in Belgrade, when General Zivojin Misic and Hungarian representative Bela Linder signed the final document ending hostilities between Hungary and Serbia. Through documentary storytelling and newly uncovered material, the film shifts the geographic center of the war narrative from the Western Front to the Balkans, an undertaking that, whether or not historians accept it in full, demands serious production and research infrastructure.
That infrastructure, according to available information, was provided by Savkovic’s own company Alternativa and Austria’s ArtMedia, along with actors Dragan Vujic Vujke, Milan Milosavljevic and Danica Radulovic. The film is almost entirely unavailable to domestic audiences. It premiered in Brussels in September 2025, organized by the European Economic and Social Committee, while a screening scheduled for November 13, 2025 at Belgrade’s Sava Center was canceled without explanation. What is left is a closed screening for diplomats and journalists at the European House, and that is, for now, everything the domestic public has seen of the film in person.
A cultural policy that doesn’t follow its own films to the festivals where they win isn’t a new story, but it rarely gets illustrated this directly. While teams of five to eight people sat at neighboring tables, backed by national broadcasters and ministries, the Serbian representative picked up his certificate alone. The award doesn’t change that. It just makes the gap harder to miss.
