March Film Festival, Belgrade’s popular documentary and short film festival, will be running for five days with a packed programme.
The 65th edition of the March Film Festival, a popular Belgrade documentary and short film festival, will be held this year from March 28th to April 1st. All screenings will take place at Dom Omladine, as the venue is organising the entire festival this year.
This year, the festival’s main goal seems to be expanding in terms of the number of national and international participants, competitors, prizes, and the number of festival days. For the first time, the March Film Festival will last for a full five days.
Decades ago, when the festival first started, the Serbian Film Centre decided to ensure the event created and supported an environment in which more and more high-quality national documentaries and short films could be created. It also sought to ensure that the environment inspired young filmmakers, mostly from the Academy of Dramatic Arts, to push the boundaries of film and to create something new in the Serbian cinematographic landscape.
Today, the result is a festival with as many as 4,000 national and international entries for the competition programme and 80 films competing for the festival’s Grand Prix, which is awarded in six categories: Best Feature Documentary, Best Documentary Short, Best Animated, Best Domestic Short, Best International Short and Best Experimental Film/Video Art.
This year, four more award categories have been introduced: Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing and Best Sound Design/Music.
The festival opens with one of the best Serbian documentaries of the last couple of years, Jelena Stolica’s Tierra Utopia, a film about a small Spanish town where the local government confiscates land from the rich and distributes it equally among all town residents, in an experiment in Socialist utopia through communal life. The film asks questions about the nature of property and capitalism, and, most importantly, whether there is any hope for creating a utopia.
Another highlight will be Long Journey into War by Milos Skundric, a historical documentary thriller about the beginnings of World War I.
This year’s retrospective programme is dedicated to the great contemporary Austrian filmmaker, Ruth Beckermann. The festival will feature four of her major films, all dealing with how our perception of the past shapes the way we live our lives today, through a close and keen examination of modern society and its many facets.
