The 50th Film Script Festival opens tonight in Vrnjacka Banja with a guest who won the top prize at its very first edition, back in 1977. Screenwriter Predrag Perisic, who shared that award with Milan Jelic for “The Love Affair of Budimir Trajkovic,” will take a seat at the Danilo Bata Stojkovic amphitheater’s Summer Stage as a living reminder of what the festival stood for over half a century. No one from the Screenwriters’ Association of Serbia will be in that audience.
The guild the festival is named after was not invited and, by its own account, would not have shown up anyway. Vladimir Djurdjevic, the Association’s president, told the weekly Vreme that the group has had no contact with the festival for a second year running.
“They never called us, and we would not have accepted an invitation to a festival run this way. That festival was lost to us last year.”
The phrase behind that verdict is a year old. “The festival has been seized from screenwriters and handed over to producers and political structures,” screenwriters from the Association wrote last summer, after an edition in which the audience booed Zeljko Mitrovic.
Why do screenwriters skip the script festival?
Because, in Djurdjevic’s reading, the problem is not the program but the framework that produces it. His complaint does not stop at Vrnjacka Banja.
“This festival, like others being organized now, looks like putting makeup on a corpse. An illusion. And it has been that way for two years, for as long as the Film Center of Serbia has had no open call. The only precondition for Serbian cinema to start working again is for the state to start working.”
The Film Center of Serbia’s failure to run an open call for two seasons running explains why the fight over one summer festival gets this heated. When there is no state money for script development, production houses remain the only route from page to screen, and a festival built around screenwriting stops being a showcase for the profession and becomes a shop window for whoever happens to be filming. Djurdjevic sums it up bluntly: “So now it just serves Vrnjacka Banja’s tourism. It is no longer a cultural event, only a tourist one.”
A selection that turned no one away
When we reported on the anniversary edition and its jury lineup a few days ago, thirteen competition films looked like an ordinary festival year. It was not: exactly thirteen films were submitted. Last year nine were submitted, and all nine made the competition.
The second number is more telling. Four films in this year’s competition program are produced by Apollon Media, Zeljko Mitrovic’s company. Last year the same production house accounted for six of nine titles, so its share has technically halved, even as the absolute count held steady while the festival grew by four films. No international award winners appear in the selection, this year or last.
Festival executive producer Marko Jovicic points to the open call for best original screenplay, which drew more than 350 scripts this year, and credits that turnout to the fact that the winning script genuinely gets made into a film by the following edition. Apollon Media is the one making it. This year’s competition includes four premieres, among them “Duplicate,” winner of the 2025 open call. The loop has, in other words, closed in public for the first time: the company runs the call, produces the winner, then competes with that same film at the festival it sponsors.
What is screening from August 9 to 13
The competition opens with “Hajduk in Belgrade,” based on the novel of the same name by Gradimir Stojkovic, with a screenplay by Milica Konstantinovic Stanojevic. Out of competition, the “Preko Plota” program screens “Room 23” and “Harvest.” Before the gala opening, actor Ivan Bosiljcic’s concert “Nase Vece” and a parade of participants take place at Trg Kulture.
Winners are announced on August 13, with awards for:
- the competition jury prizes, decided by a panel chaired by Svetislav Basara alongside screenwriter Biljana Maksic and Milos Jankovic
- the journalists’ award, decided by Zorica Dragojevic, Aleksandar Gajovic, Branimir Lokner and Ljubomir Radanov
- the “Gordan Mihic Golden Pen” for contribution to screenwriting, the “Marko Zivic” award for young actor, and a new prize marked with a castle emblem
Closing night brings a screening of “Sports Heart” and a concert by the Zrenjanin Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. The festival is funded by Telekom Srbija, the Ministry of Culture and the municipality of Vrnjacka Banja, and organizers say every living past winner has been invited.
That list of past winners is, incidentally, the strongest argument that something has been lost: Dusan Kovacevic, Gordan Mihic, Abdulah Sidran, Srdjan Karanovic, Dusan Makavejev, Srdjan Dragojevic, Minja Bogavac. Fifty years is a long enough run that a festival should be measured not by how many films it accepted, but by how many it turned down. This year, it turned down none.
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