Joymakers, Omama Win Grand Prix at Belgrade's March Festival
Belgrade's Dom omladine handed out the Grand Prix of the combined 72nd and 73rd March Festival to 'Omama' and 'Joymakers,' films about Hungarian silence and Roma brass musicians.
On Sunday, September 27, the stage of Belgrade’s Dom omladine hosted the awards ceremony for two festival editions at once, the 72nd and 73rd March Festival, the Belgrade Festival of Documentary and Short Film. Seven days earlier, on September 21, the same stage had opened a program of 26 premieres, and it closed with an evening in which the top prizes went to two films that barely belong to the same cinematic language.
The Grand Prix of the 72nd edition went to “Joymakers,” a documentary by director Jelena Radenovic about Roma brass musicians from southern Serbia. The jury’s citation was short and direct.
A documentary investigation into the musical heritage of Roma brass musicians reveals that behind the dynamic melodies lies a hard life.
The Grand Prix of the 73rd edition went in a completely different direction, to “Omama,” a Hungarian, Belgian and Portuguese coproduction directed by Martin Hero, told entirely through still photographs, with no conventional moving image at all. Where the first Grand Prix is loud and kinetic, the second is quiet and still, and the jury recognized exactly that.
A film that offers an intimate and unusual meditation on resilience and decay, on the class gap between its two main characters.
Taken together, the two Grand Prix winners, one shot in the field and full of motion, the other built from photographs and stillness, capture the range of the selection this year’s combined March Festival actually covered.
The winners were chosen by a jury made up of actor and producer Stefan Uros Tesic, director of photography Rajko Djukic, and actor and educator Milan Bosiljcic, with the awards presented by festival board president Nikola Rajicic. The rest of the list shows just how varied the selection was:
- best feature film of the 72nd edition: “Prica o Subi” (screenplay by Vladimir Bajic, directed by Andreja Milinovic), a portrait of musician Mitar Subotic
- best feature film of the 73rd edition: “Ros” by Dusan Krstic, about a Belgrade resident of Slovenian descent who became honorary consul of the Kingdom of Norway
- best experimental film: “Bombas” by Zlatko Milojicic
- best international film of the 72nd edition: the American film “Brzina distance izmedju nas” by Juval Sapira; the 73rd edition’s went to the Montenegrin film “Uros” by Mate Uljarevic
- best screenplay: Nenad Dzoni Rackovic for “Kralj nicega” (72nd edition), and Uros Vladimir Janjic for “Zidovi govore” (73rd edition)
- best short film of the 72nd edition: “Pele, Dzaja, Slavka” by Dragana Kanjevac, and of the 73rd, “Duznik mrtvima” by Aleksandar Ciric, dedicated to Dragoljub Zlatkovic, who has spent six decades recording the folk heritage of the Pirot region
- best animated film: “Kako sam upoznao svoga zeku” by Luka Marincevic
The prizes are not classic statuettes but one of a kind sculptures called “Artistic Imprints of Belgrade,” made by multimedia artist Srdjan Stefanovic and cast directly from Belgrade soil. Outside the competition, the festival closed with the Belgrade premiere of the documentary “Petrovic, Miroslav Bata: filmovi iz inata!,” directed by Srdjan Stojanovic and dedicated to Miroslav Bata Petrovic, a documentarian whose body of work includes more than 160 films he directed himself and over 350 he produced. It was a quiet way to close out two years of the festival compressed into a single week.
